ABSTRACT
Name: Sik Son Department: Counseling, Adult and Higher Education
Title: From Student Activism to a Way of Life: A Case Study of Student Activists-tumed-Peasant Activists in South Korea
Major: Adult Education Degree: Doctor of Education
Approved by: Date:
oq 01 Dissd •tafjon Director
NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT
Social movements have emerged as a new source of adult learning in the
current literature of adult education. They offer different aspects of adult learning
which have been put aside in institutional settings. In the institutional settings, the
focus of adult education was placed on obtaining technical knowledge which
enabled the learners to access better jobs based on individual competitions. The
dichotomy between the educators as experts and the students as passive learners
seems apparent and the existing power relation is seldom covered. Learning in
social movements challenges the existing power relation, espouses collective
learning, and gives more power to the learners as the subjects of their learning in a
true sense. The current study was designed to explore this learning process in detail.
Six Korean student activists-tumed-peasant activists participated in this
study. They went to universities during the 1980s when South Korea suffered under
military regimes. They became student activists energetically engaging in the pro
democracy movement against the military dictatorships. On leaving universities,
they turned themselves into peasants to engage in the peasant movement, which
they thought was one of the key forces for Korean revolution. In their communities,
they worked hard to transform themselves into peasants as well as organizing the
communities for the peasant cause and social justice for over 15 years. In-depth
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. interviews and observations were used to explore their transformative learning
process in their communities.
The results show that the lives of the activists were full of transformative
learning processes and the transformation has been sustained for over a decade.
They learned from the peasants and the reality, modifying their vision for future.
The discrepancy between their initial vision and the reality has been overcome
through their practices. Experiential learning and collective learning were identified
as key factors to speed up the learning process of the participants. They also
developed their own pedagogy through their practices. Non-rationality factors, such
as commitment, dialogue, and relation-building, were identified as key components
in their pedagogy. Furthermore, social actions became the important places of
learning for the participants. They went through personal transformation in the
actions and obtained the critical knowledge to improve their practices.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY
FROM STUDENT ACTIVISM TO A WAY OF LIFE: A CASE STUDY OF
STUDENT ACTIVISTS-TURNED-PEASANT ACTIVISTS IN
SOUTH KOREA
A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE
DOCTOR OF EDUCATION
DEPARTMENT OF COUNSELING ADULT, AND HIGHER EDUCATION
BY
SIK SON
DEKALB, ILLINOIS
MAY 2007
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School policies, this dissertation is accepted in
partial fulfillment of degree requirements.
Dissert^uon/pirectoi
tliu 09 01 Date /
ANY U SE O F MATERIAL CONTAINED HEREIN M UST BE DULY ACKNOWLEDGED. THE AUTHOR'S PERMISSION MUST BE OBTAINED IF ANY PORTION IS TO BE PUBLISHED OR INCLUDED IN A PUBLICATION.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In Korea, when people achieved something important in their lives, the
elders used to say to them, “Never think you achieved it because you were smart or
excellent; you should think about the people who helped you to achieve your goal.”
There won’t be a better time to remember the wise advice than now at the end of my
graduate study. I’d like to express my sincere appreciation to people who helped,
supported, and inspired me to finish my dissertation.
I would like to thank to the participants of this study. They were the ones
who made this study possible and their works for social justice are the beacon of
hope for many adult educators who strongly believe that adult educators can play a
role to build a more democratic and equitable society.
I would like to thank to my committee members. Dr. Jorge Jeria guided my
research and gave helpful comments in the whole process of my writing. He always
believed in me and encouraged me to work hard. Dr. Rosemary Feurer broadened
my perspective with her rich knowledge in the labor history of the United States,
and I was fascinated by learning about the radical history. Dr. Lisa Baumgartner
gave me great help when I struggled in my writing. She always gave me useful
advice and support when I needed them.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. My special thanks also go to Dr. Phyllis Cunningham. She was always an
inspiration and moral compass to me. Working with her and learning with her made
me convinced that there are many things I can do as an adult educator for social
justice. Without the conviction, I couldn’t finish this work.
Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to my parents and my wife,
Yonjoo Ryu, for their endless support and love.
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Page
LIST OF TABLES...... ix
Chapter
1. INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY...... 1
Introduction...... 1
Purpose of the Study...... 4
Significance of the Study...... 5
Research Questions for the Study...... 6
Researcher’s Background...... 7
Organization of the Study...... 10
Key Term s...... 11
Limitations of the Study...... 12
2. METHODOLOGY...... 13
Rationale for the Methodology...... 13
Sample Selection...... 14
Methods of Data Collection...... 14
In-depth Interviews...... 15
Observations...... 16
Documents...... 17
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Chapter Page
Field notes and Analytical Memos...... 17
Methods of Analysis...... 17
Single Interviews...... 17
Multiple Interviews...... 19
Validity Issues...... 19
Participant Selection...... 19
Triangulation...... 20
3. THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT OF THE STUDY ...... 22
Introduction...... 22
Political Context in the 1960s and the 1970s...... 23
Economic Background in the 1960s and the 1970s...... 29
Political Context in the 1980s...... 31
Political Context from the 1990s to the Present...... 37
The Korean Peasant League and the Peasant Movement in Korea...... 39
Summary...... 42
4. ADULT EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS...... 45
Introduction...... 45
Social Movements as a Place of “Personal Transformation”...... 46
Social Movements as “Learning Sites”...... 51
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Chapter Page
Social Movements as “Cognitive Praxis” ...... 53
Social Movements and Organized Labor...... 56
Transformative Learning in Social Movements...... 59
Summary...... 61
5. SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND MIN JUNG EDUCATION IN KOREA 62
Introduction...... 62
Different Approaches in Understanding the ConceptM of injung ...... 63
Social Science Approach...... 63
Historical Approach...... 66
Christian Approach...... 67
Minjung Education in the 1960s and the 1970s...... 69
Christian Minjung Education...... 69
The Yahak Movement in the 1960s and the 1970s...... 72
Summary...... 75
Minjung Education in the 1980s...... 75
Marxism andMinjung Education...... 76
The Yahak Movement in the 1 9 8 0 s...... 80
Summary...... 81
Minjung Education from the 1990s to the Present...... 82
The Yahak Movement in the 1990s...... 84
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Chapter Page
Minjung Education and Academic Research...... 84
6. THE INTERPRETATION OF THE FINDINGS ...... 91
Learning from Peasants: The Development of Vision...... 91
Finding and Settling Down in the Communities...... 93
Learning Reality: Hard Labor and Economic Survival...... 98
Experiential Learning in Collective W ork...... 103
Learning Collective Culture...... 106
Learning with Peasants: The Development of Pedagogy...... 108
Pedagogy of Commitment...... 108
Pedagogy of Building Relationship...... 123
Pedagogy of Dialogue...... 130
Learning in Social A ction...... 137
Local vs. National...... 138
Personal Transformation...... 142
The Significance of Political Alliance...... 150
Gender Awareness...... 154
7. CONCULUSION AND IMPLICATIONS FOR ADULT EDUCATION 157
REFERENCES...... 163
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Table Page
1. Rate of Foodstuff Self-Sufficiency...... 41
2. Change of Farming Population...... 43
3. The Debt of Farmer Households...... 43
4. Aging Population...... 44
5. Comparison of Public Education and Minjung Education...... 86
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INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY
Introduction
On a hot day in June 1987,1 was among a group of about 100 freshmen who
packed a large lecture room, discussing what to do in face of the escalating political
confrontation between people demanding democracy and a blatant military regime
exerting every possible means to crush the people’s aspiration for democracy.
Tension was high and the students looked serious. The representatives of five
majors in the department stepped forwarded onto a podium to announce their group
decisions made in their separate group discussions. After the announcement, they
made their departmental decision for their course of action and the decision was
declared: Let’s go to the city hall to protest against the military regime. Soon, the
student groups gathered around in front of their department building and they were
joined by sophomores, juniors, and seniors who had finished their own meetings in
a similar manner. The morale of the students hit the sky when they sang and chanted
together for the democracy of their nation. The students’ number snowballed into
over 3,000 when all departments in the university came together. Later, thousands
of students and citizens took to the streets, chanting “death to the dictatorship” and
demanding “direct presidential election” in the center of Seoul, the capital city of
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Korea. On June 29, 1987, the military regime succumbed to the demand and
accepted a direct presidential election.
This was my first taste of participatory democracy, collective action and
people power as a university student. It was a transformative learning experience in
my life and such a personal experience is bound in the history of social movements.
People learn and create their knowledge in collective actions for common goals in
social movements (Hammond, 1998; Lander, 2005; Mitchell, 1987; Turner, 1999).
Specifically, they learn how to organize meetings, how to work with peoples, and
how to develop leadership, and in doing so they transform themselves as well as
society.
Yet the learning in social movements has not attracted much attention from
educators. Dykstra and Law (1994) articulate that the reason for this is “in part
because of a related reluctance on the part of many adult educators to embrace as
‘educational’ the informal learning that takes place in everyday life, whether
‘systematically organized’ or not” (p. 121).
Korea’s modem history was full of rich experience of fighting against
colonialism and military dictatorships. The nation was colonized by Japan in 1911
and suffered severe oppression for 35 years. After the liberation in 1945, Korea had
to endure decades of military dictatorships. In spite of the harsh and cruel
oppression by Japanese colonialism and military dictatorships, Koreans consistently
fought to build an independent and democratic nation, and the process was full of
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the transformative learning process of people who bravely risked their lives for the
cause.
During the 1980s, the violent conflict betweenminjung (a coalition of
classes) movement and the military regimes came to an apex. Thousands of labor
workers, peasants, urban poor, students, and white-collar workers joined the
movement around the nation and forced the military regime to accept direct
presidential elections as well as other democratic measures in 1987.
In the 1990s, Koreans successfully elected a civil government and entered
into a new era in which thesimin movement (New Social Movement) came to the
fore to seize the extended political space created by theminjung movement. Unlike
the minjung movement, which aimed to bring revolutionary social change by seizing
a state power, the simin movement tried to reform the political and economical
system instead of structural change, taking on the issues such as the environment,
gender, and economic justice. In these respectively distinct periods, both the
minjung movement and thesimin movement became the learning places where
many Koreans learned how to organize, how to work with different groups, how to
develop policies, and how to work with the state. Yet few studies have been
conducted to learn about the learning process in the field of adult education. As a
result, the learning process was left scattered in personal memories and the
experiential and transformative knowledge created in the movements were left
unorganized.
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Purpose of the Study
The purpose of this study was to uncover the process of adult learning in a
social movement. I analyzed the life experience of student activists-tumed-peasant
activists working for social change in South Korea. In the recent literature of adult
education, social movements came to the fore as a new source of adult learning, but
adult education research has mainly centered on institutional settings and individual
learners. In this sense, the study on the learning dimension of social movements is in
great need, not only to expand the notion of adult learning which has been narrowed
in the current discourse but also to better understand the dynamic process of adult
learning in collective actions. This study of student activists-tumed-peasant activists
contributes to developing such studies.
Additionally, the participants had time to reflect on their practices through
this study. In their busy daily lives and daily struggles for social changes, the
activists are learning but they don’t have enough time to reflect and articulate what
they have learned. On the other hand, academic researchers tend to focus on abstract
ideas, often with no anchor in reality. In this study, the activists had time to analyze
their practices by sharing their insights, which would help them to improve their
practices in the future. At the same time, I, as a researcher, could ground my
research on the reality and became a link between the movement and academia.
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Significance of the Study
This study is significant in several ways. First, it expands the scope of
current adult education literature. In history, adult education has played a significant
role to bring about social change and took place in many places out of school
systems (Adams, 1975; Alexander, 1997; Altenbaugh, 1990; Fieldhouse, 1996;
Glenn, 1988). However, the recent trend in adult education tends to focus on
education for earning and adult educators are preoccupied with setting up their
professional territory (Collins, 1995; Cunningham, 1993). As a result, the rich
experience of marginalized peoples learning to critically understand society and
creating their knowledge as subjects in social movements has been ignored and
discarded. This study seeks to overcome the negligence of the field.
Second, this study contributes to the developing of sociology of adult
education. Recent literature of adult literature has been overwhelmingly influenced
by psychology and individual learners became the main focus of the field. As a
result, neither the impact of society on individual learners nor adult learners’
responds to the societal conditions was fully addressed. This study will seek to
understand individual learners in their social contexts.
Third, this study adds new knowledge to the literature in terms of
understanding the relationship between old social movements and new social
movements based on Korean experience both in theminjung movement in the 1980s
and thesimin movement in the 1990s.
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Finally, this study contributes to the development of agency in the field of
adult education by reminding adult educators of adult education’s historical role in
promoting social justice. In doing so, it will encourage them to join the efforts to
create more space in which adults can engage in educational projects for social
justice.
Research Questions for the Study
In this research, several questions will be examined. First, how have the
activists’ visions for social change been transformed since their initial settlements in
their communities? They have been working in their communities for over 15 years
and surely they went through many changes in their practices. I have examined how
this took place. Second, how have they developed their personal skills required in
their work as peasants? When they came to their communities, they were just young
students with nothing but passion for social change. They had to learn a lot of things
in a short period of time technically and organizationally. Third, how do they
reframe their pedagogy to work with communities? They came to their communities
with their ideas based on their experience in student activism so that basically they
lacked experience in working with peasants. In order to achieve their purpose, they
had to learn how to work with peasants, which led to their own development of their
pedagogy in their own contexts. Finally, it has asked how they organized people in
their communities and what they did learn in the social actions.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Researcher’s Background
I went to a university in 1987 when my country, South Korea, was under a
brutal dictatorship in which human rights was a luxury. The regime didn’t hesitate
to kill its own citizens in cold blood when they stood up against its power. In the
face of this oppressive situation, universities, with comparatively free space from
the oppression, became a powerful source of resistance, and a student movement
was at the forefront of a movement for democracy. The volatile political situation
tore apart my naive idea of a romantic university life and changed the course of my
life. I became an ardent and devoted student activist.
When the student activists became seniors, they made their decisions on
their course of action for the future. In other words, they had to choose their own
fields of working to advance democracy instead of getting their degrees. The top
priority was to organize the labor movement and the peasant movement because the
activists believed that those groups were the core groups which could bring about a
fundamental social change in Korean society. I chose without any hesitance to
become a labor worker, convinced that the labor workers would take the torch for
Korean revolution. Depending on their decisions, the student activists organized
small groups in which they prepared for their transfer from student activists to
peasant activists. On finishing the preparation, the members scattered around the
nation with a conviction of being a seed of fire for a future revolution, especially to
go where many workers resided for labor groups and to the countryside for peasant
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groups.
A few years later after working in factories, my group decided to pull out of
the factories. Given the political development from a military regime to a civilian
government during the 1990s, we thought that we could work better in other settings
rather than engaging in the labor movement with unstable positions and limited
roles. With politically much more open space, we thought we had to make inroads
into other fields to expand the movement. Previously, the student activists believed
that they had to engage only in the labor movement or the peasant movement to
bring about a social change into the nation, but the conception began to change. For
example, various civil organizations formed up to work on some issues which were
not dealt with in the labor movement and peasant movement. Furthermore, white-
collar labor Unions, such as the Teachers’ Union and Korean Federation of Clerical
& Financial Labor Union, started to widen the concept of labor workers which
formerly was confined to blue-collar workers. In this new environment, we had
discussed what we could do and came to conclusions that (1) the labor movement
had been developed and it demanded less support from student activists than before;
(2) the roles we could play in our contexts were very limited given the situation that
we worked under the fake names, and we believed that we needed to work legally
under the new political environment; and (3) we began to recognize the importance
of white-collar labor unions and various civil organizations. As student activists, we
believed that we could take advantage of our diplomas and become the experts in
different fields in the new situation. Under the military regimes, getting a diploma
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. was meaningless to the student activists who wanted to engage in the labor
movement and the peasant movement. But the new situation posed a new question:
we needed to organize the middle class on top of workers and peasants to build a
more democratic society. Then, how about taking advantage of our diplomas to be
experts in different fields? With those conclusions, we returned to the universities
and finished our studies and legally got jobs in different fields. There were different
opinions about this pull-out from what we thought was the forefront of the
movement among student groups. Some, like my group, pulled out and others
stayed.
Based on the conclusions, I became an adult educator and I am not a labor
organizer any more. Yet, I still believe I can contribute to the cause I shared with
my friends who are still working in factories and on farms. When we were student
activists, being labor workers and peasants seemed the only option for us in
selecting jobs. Choosing a different path was considered a betrayal for the
movement among the student activists. But we do not think in such a narrow way
any more. The place you are becomes less important and the more important thing is
to make space wherever you are in which seeds of social change can grow. As an
adult educator, I want to bring the knowledge developed by people when they
engage in social movements to academia so that their voices can be heard.
On reflection, I think I learned a lot when I engaged in the movement, much
more than what I learned in schools. But the process of learning in social
movements has not been fully realized and we need to learn how people learn when
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they take part in social movements.
Organization of the Study
This study consists of six chapters. Chapter 1, as a beginning chapter, will
explain the purpose of the study, the significance of the study, and research
questions. In Chapter 2, the methodology which guides this study will be explained.
The rationale for the study, data collection, and a way of data analysis are included
in this chapter. Chapter 3 will lay a foundation to explore this study by giving a
historical background. The chapter explores the historical transformation of Korea
from an oppressed and poor country under military dictatorships to a democratic and
industrialized modem country. The presenceminjung of through the political
process will be included in this chapter. In Chapter 4, the related literature in North
America will be reviewed. The recent literature about the relationship between
social movements and adult education will be examined. In Chapter 5, the literature
review will turn to Korea and explore Korea’s uniqueminjung education literature.
Chapter 6 will cover the interpretation of the findings of this study. Major themes
will be categorized and explained in the voice of the participants. Chapter 7 will
conclude and summarize the learning process of the participants, suggesting some
ways to incorporate transformative learning in social movements into the current
literature of adult education.
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Key Terms
I have used some Korean terms and those will be explained in detail in this
study. But it would be helpful briefly to explain the terms before going into the
details.
Minjung means a coalition of classes, such as workers, peasants, and urban
poor, formed in the struggles against the oppression such as imperialism and
military dictatorships in Korea.
Minjung education means education forminjung and can be translated into
“popular education” in English. It is education for the oppressed and it challenges
the oppressive power relations to liberate the oppressed, working for social justice
and a more equitable society.
Minjung movement means social movements led by theminjung and can be
translated into old social movements while thesimin movement was led by the
middle class and translated in English as new social movements.
Hakchul means the worker activists or peasant activists with backgrounds of
student activism.
Nongwhal is a student group activity during their breaks in which they went
to the countryside to help peasants work while trying to raise peasants’ political
consciousness.
In addition, Korean names were used in accordance with the traditional
Korean way which put the family name first.
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Limitations of the Study
This study had its own limitations to consider. First, the case number was
very limited in the context of the peasant movement in Korea. Instead of having
many participants, this study chose to focus on a few participants who did
extraordinary work in their settings and tried to examine their learning process in
detail through in-depth interviews.
Second, it is still a story of several intellectuals who engaged in the social
movement. As the participants did, there were lots of many peasants and labor
workers who went through “transformative learning” in the Korean context, and it is
important to examine the learning process of the participants. Foley (1999) claims
that adult educators need to engage in research related to the learning process of
people engaging in social movements instead of some intellectuals. This study
cannot be free from the criticism. Yet, this study is still meaningful because it is the
study of some intellectuals who succeeded overcoming the limitations of many
intellectuals symbolized in the concept of “banking education.”
A final limitation is due to the fact that the voice of the participants had to be
translated into English from Korean. Though I tried my best to deliver the voice
correctly, the nature of translation, the lost meaning that occurs culturally through
language, posed a limit.
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METHODOLOGY
Rationale for the Methodology
Maxwell (1996), in a simple comparison of qualitative research and
quantitative research, explains; “Quantitative researchers tend to be interested in
whether and to what extent variance inx causes variance iny. Qualitative
researchers, on the other hand, tend to ask howx plays a role in causingy, what the
process is that connects x and / ’ (p. 20). My interest in this study was to examine
the process of the activists to explore their learning process, so qualitative research
seems to be more appropriate for my study.
Of different types of qualitative studies, I chose a case study for the research
design. Merriam (1998) and other authors (Smith, 1978; Stake, 1995) define case
studies as a “bounded system” and the “bounded system,” or case, need to be
selected. In this study, I have a definite case of student activists-tumed-peasant
activists to explore their learning process in a social movement and it makes case
study applicable for this study. Moreover, this study fits well with the characteristics
defined by Merriam as special features of case studies. She suggests three features
of case studies: particularistic, descriptive, and heuristic. Particularistic means that
the studies have specific cases such as situation, program, and events. Descriptive
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means that the result of the study will be the rich description of the case, and
heuristic means that the study can bring about “the discovery of new meaning,
extend the reader’s experience, or confirm what is known” (p. 30). This dissertation
focused on the unique case of student activists-turned-peasant activists
(particularistic), data were gathered through in-depth interviews with the activists,
producing thick descriptions (descriptive), and the study results bring a new
understanding of the learning process of adults in social movements (heuristic).
Given the nature of the study based on the definitions in the field, the case study
seems an appropriate design.
Sample Selection
Six Korean student activists-turned-peasant activists were selected in
purposive sampling for their active involvement in both the student movement and
the peasant movement. All participants were student activists devoting their
university lives into a fight against military dictatorships during the 1980s in Korea.
On leaving the universities, they became peasant activists to organize peasants for
social change and they have worked at least 15 years since the initial settlements for
social justice in their communities.
Methods of Data Collection
Qualitative methods were chosen for this study to reveal the learning process
of student activists-tumed-peasant activists in their communities in detail through
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their perspectives. For the purpose of this study, in-depth interviews with the
activists and observation of their actions in their communities were the primary
source of data for this research. The interviews were conducted in Korean and I
translated the transcripts into English. In addition, participants’ journals, newspapers,
and community organization documents were used to supplement the primary
source. During the interviews and observations, field notes and analytical memos
were continuously taken for future data analysis. In this study, I wanted the
participants to have their voices in the research process. They were not regarded as
the passive participants who had to be researched. Rather, I considered this study as
dialogues between the activists in two different fields to reflect on the past and
current practices by which we could come up with systemic ways to advance our
work for a more egalitarian and sustainable society.
In-depth Interviews
The in-depth interviews were the primary source of information, and they
were crucially important to get thick descriptions from the participants for the study.
For this purpose, building rapport with the participants seemed important to create a
comfortable situation in which the participants felt free to speak. I believed that my
position as a former student activist helped to ease the possible tension that might
prevent them from revealing their deep thoughts. Prior to the interviews, I called
them to make schedules, and visited the participants’ communities, having time to
explain what I want to do with this research. In informal meetings before the
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interviews, I talked with them and shared my story of why I decided to be an adult
educator. After that, I had formal interviews while staying at their homes for two or
three days and in one case I had interviews in their workplace. The interviews were
held two or three times with the participants and each interview took three to five
hours. I gathered data both from formal interviews and informal interviews.
Preliminary data gathering about the communities was done before the interviews to
understand the participants’ situations. All interviews were conducted in the form of
open-ended questions and recorded, transcribed, and analyzed into the emerging
themes.
Observations
During the visits, I observed the participants’ daily lives, community
activities, and their political actions as leaders of the locals in the communities.
When I visited Korea, the Korean Peasant League (KPL) was waging a big rally
against the ratification of the rice market opening by the National Assembly as a
part of a free trade policy. The participants as leaders of the locals were working
hard to build support for the action. Some were waging sit-ins in front of their local
government buildings. I visited their camps, and observed their meetings. I also
attended their national rally held in Seoul in which thousands of peasants
participated.
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Documents
Public documents, such as newspapers, government documents, and the
Korean Peasants League documents, were collected to supplement the primary
source. In addition, personal documents, such as diary and participant journals, were
gathered as a way to ensure the triangulation of data sources.
Field notes and Analytical Memos
Field notes and analytical memos were written regularly for future data
analysis and reviewed frequently.
Methods of Analysis
Data analysis is an ongoing process in qualitative research and many
experienced researchers are advising not to wait for data analysis until the
completion of data gathering (Creswell, 2002; Maxwell, 1996; Merriam, 1998;
Merriam & Simpson, 2000). I followed this advice by starting data analysis while
doing data gathering.
Single Interviews
I recorded the interview directly to my computer in mp3 format. When I did
my interviews, I put the laptop in front of me and a small microphone was placed
between me and the interviewees. A sound recording program, called Total
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Recorder, was used to record the sound in mp 3 format. Direct laptop recording was
very effective and beneficial in several ways. First, it was easy to control the
recording process: easy to start, easy to stop, and easy to tell whether the progress of
the interview was going well. Second, it was easy to manage the recording files with
its digital format. I could cut the sound files into the small sizes I wanted and repeat
the sound bites again and again. The last benefit was the economic savings. People
who had laptops did not need to buy digital recorders for their interviews.
After the interview, the sound files were split into small segments for
transcription and organization. I kept writing memos for future analysis and the
transcriptions were made immediately. With the first transcript, I did an exploratory
analysis in which I read through the transcript and identified general ideas. During
the analysis, I wrote analytical memos for the possible codes and themes. All
memos taken during the interviews were reviewed and analyzed.
In search of general code and themes, I used the analytic tool suggested by
Dykstra and Law (1994). They argue that social movements are educational forces
which have not been fully researched, suggesting a framework to analyze social
movements. The framework consists of three key elements: vision, critical
pedagogy, and pedagogy of mobilization. They explain that “the vision that
educators have provides an essential dimension of education - the language of
meaning” and critical pedagogy means “an educational practice that critically
informs, challenges and engages people in the creation and recreation of
knowledge” (p. 123). Pedagogy of mobilization is “the practical process that
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involves people in building and sustaining the movement” (Dykstra & Law, 1994, p.
124)
I used those elements as general themes to start the analysis. Based on the
analysis, next interviews were planned and adjusted. All fieldnotes were gathered
and analyzed while I kept writing reflective and analytical memos for future
analysis. During the process, I reported what I found to the participants and had
their feedback.
Multiple Interviews
After the final interview, all transcripts were printed out. General ideas and
themes identified in single interviews were gathered and compared. Based on these
exploratory themes and ideas, I began coding. After the coding, I compared and
examined the codes, making possible links, developing coding categories, and
generating themes. Various tables and conceptual maps were utilized to find
meaningful themes and the constant comparison method was used to analyze the
data (Biklen & Bogdan, 1998; Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Huberman & Miles, 1994).
Validity Issues
Participant Selection
The participants were student activists who fought against military regimes
when they were attending universities. They chose to be peasants because they
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believed that the peasants were one of the key groups to organize to bring a
fundamental social change to the nation. During the 1970s and 80s, being university
students was a privilege which guaranteed future jobs in Korea, and parents did
whatever they could do to send their children to universities with hopes that their
children would be better off with the degrees. In this situation, the participants made
up their minds to be peasants against their parents’ wishes with their commitment
for social change. They went to the countryside, settled down, and began their work
for social justice.
This was not an easy job and some students pulled out of the countryside
before long for various reasons. Yet the participants in this study have kept up their
work for over 15 years in their communities, successfully transforming themselves
into peasants. Given their extraordinary work, the participants seemed to be
valuable sources by which to understand the learning process in social movements.
Triangulation
Maxwell (1996) points out the two important threats to the validity of
qualitative study: researcher bias and reactivity. Positivist researchers used to claim
the neutrality of their research but recent developments of understanding power and
research made the claim obsolete. It is almost impossible to get rid of researchers’
bias, though the efforts to minimize the bias should be implemented. In this
situation, researchers now began to acknowledge their positions so that people could
understand the possible impact instead of claiming false neutrality (Mehra, 2001;
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Scheurich, 1994). In this study, I also should acknowledge that my background as a
former student activist made an impact on the design and outcome of this research,
but I tried to keep the balance in maintaining my perspectives as both an insider and
an outsider. Reactivity was about influence which researchers could make on their
settings or interviewees. To minimize the threat, I used unstructured open-ended
questions in my interviews so that the participants could express and reflect on their
experience freely.
I utilized several ways to secure the triangulation of the data in this study.
First of all, I collected information from various sources to reduce the risk of bias,
and a constant comparison method was used to check the discrepancy and
irregularity of the data. The interviews were held until I had enough rich data so that
the data could tell by themselves instead of my preconceptions. During the
interviews, the questions were in the form of open-ended questions to make sure
getting what they wanted to say rather than focusing on what I wanted to get. After
the interviews, the constant comparison method was utilized to find emerging
themes and a member check was also used to make sure of the validity of the
interpretation.
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THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT OF THE STUDY
Introduction
South Korea is an East Asian country located in the southern part of the
Korean peninsula. The population of the nation is around 500 million and the size is
slightly larger than the state of Indiana in the United States. Korea was colonized by
Japan in 1911 and liberated in 1945 after the Japanese surrender in World War II.
Right after the defeat, Soviet Union troops came to the northern part of Korea and
U.S troops took the southern part. For Koreans, the end of the world war meant the
victory of their continued fights for their independence but the winners of the war
conceived it differently. Korea was just a colony of the defeated nation. In 1945, at
the Potsdam Conference, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to divide
the nation along the 38th parallel line, giving them authority in accepting the
surrender of the Japanese army in both halves of Korea.
Under the Japanese rule, Koreans kept their fights for their independence
both in and out of the nation. In particular, many nationalists and communists
waged active guerrilla wars around the border between Korea and China. They were
well organized and ready to take charge of their independent government.
According to theGuro History Research Center in Korea, the Japanese colonial
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government suggested transferring their power to the Korean leaders in fear of their
safety when they expected their defeat. Yo Wun Hyung organizedKunjun
(Independence Preparation Committee) and 145 regional branches had been
organized in two weeks (Guro History Research Center, 1990, p. 133). But the
transfer was interrupted when the United States military came to Seoul, rejecting the
committee and the leaders. Meanwhile, Kim Il-Sung, one of the leaders who
organized the guerrilla wars against Japanese, came to Pyungyang and took charge
of organizing a communist government with the support of the Soviet Union.
Regardless of the Koreans’ aspirations for a unified nation, the political and
ideological confrontation between the United States and Soviet Union loomed large
on the Korean peninsula at the time, driving the nation into a course of national
division. The confrontation exploded into the Korean War, which caused the death
of about 4 million lives before the truce agreement in 1954 (Macdonald, 1990, p.
52).
After the Korean War, the national division was formalized. In the North,
Kim Il-Sung successfully established a communist nation while in the South
Seungman Lee built a government based on anticommunism with the support of the
United States.
Political Context in the 1960s and the 1970s
On May 16, 1961, a military group led by Major General Park Chung Hee
marched into Seoul, the capital city of Korea, in the middle of the night and took
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away power from a civil government. Right after the coup, the generals launched
the military committee to govern the nation and began to oppress the opposition.
"Martial law was imposed, public gatherings were banned, the press was muzzled, a
7:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. curfew was imposed, and banks, schools and airports were
closed” (Lewis, 1988, p. 50). In June 1961, Park, with his coup accomplices,
allowed the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) to suppress political
opponents and gave the agency the absolute power for political surveillance.
According to Haggard and Moon (1993), the KCIA immediately performed
background checks on 41,000 government employees and announced that 1,863
employees had been involved in corruption and “anti-revolutionary” activities (as
cited in Kim, 2000, p. 54). Since its establishment, KCIA became a powerful
apparatus to maintain the regime. Park described his military coup as a military
revolution for the nation.
The military revolution is not the destruction of democracy in Korea. Rather it is a way for saving it: it is a surgical operation intended to excise a malignant social, political, and economic tumour. The revolution was staged with the compassion of a benevolent surgeon who sometimes must cause pain in order to preserve life and restore health, (as cited in Chun, 2003, p. 15).
In 1963, then; retired General Park became president of Korea as a candidate
of the Democratic Republican Party and began his 18-year-long dictatorship. As
Chun (2003) pointed out, the transfer of power from a military to a civilian
government was nothing but a fagade change of the military general into a civilian
suit.
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Park took advantage of two issues to stay in power during the time. One was
the ideological opposition to communism rampant in South Korea after the
fratricidal Korean War and the other was the economical prosperity he achieved
during the time. He declared that he would eradicate the threat of communism as
well as poverty. Any challenge against his authority was conveniently described as
the threat of communism. The driving concept of his economic policy was
“development first, distribution later” which to some extent was acceptable to
Koreans due to their widespread poverty. Park used public apathy against
communism to suppress any political challenge against him and tried to solve
economic development with the inducement of foreign capital. In order to induce
needed capital for his political survival, he hurried to normalize formal relations
with Japan despite widespread anti-Japanese public sentiment. He dispatched his
right-hand man, Kim Jong Pill, also the director of the Korean Central Intelligence
Agency, to Japan and made a secret deal with the Japanese Foreign Minister. In the
deal, the Japanese government promised to offer $300 million to Park as a
compensation for its colonial rule in Korea for 35 years, even with no official
apology. The deal infuriated Koreans and they took to the streets immediately.
In March 1963, a national organization against the normalization with Japan
had been formed and began to organize a national protest. The Park regime
oppressed the protest brutally. On June 3, many universities held rallies against the
normalization of the national tie with Japan and thousand of students and citizens
gathered in the center of Seoul. Clearly, the protest was turning into an anti-Park
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regime protest, going beyond the simple protest against the pact. The regime,
threatened by the protest, declared martial law and suppressed the opposition. Later,
Park passed a bill to ratify the normalization in the National Assembly, which only
his party members attended.
In 1967, Park won his second presidency and two factors accounted for the
success. One was his political apparatus such as police, the KCIA, and the military,
and the other was its economic success in easing poverty. Later with the sinking
economy and growing opposition against his dictatorship, Park sought for a solution
to keep his power. He came up a plan to change the national constitution which at
the time allowed only two terms for a president. Naturally, it caused widespread
opposition; the students especially raised their concern and immediately took to the
streets. In spite of the mounting opposition, Park succeeded in revising the
constitution to allow his third term. In 1971, Park had a very close race with then
oppositional leader Kim Dae Jung in a presidential election where he received
6,432,828 votes (53.2%) while Kim got 5,395,900 votes (45.3%) (Kim, 2000, p. 57).
The result made the Park regime recognize that it couldn’t manipulate the political
situation any more. In a desperate effort to guarantee his lifetime tenure as president,
he declared OctoberYusin in 1972.
Chun (2003) correctly described it as “a coup-in-office” (p. 57). After the
declaration, the Park regime dissolved the National Assembly and revised the
constitution again. This time the direct presidential election had been replaced to an
indirect election by a national electoral college and term limits for president had
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been discarded. On top of that, it gave Park the power to appoint one third of the
members of the National Assembly. Park obtained the status of King through the
revision and exerted unlimited power to suppress the opposition. He also used
various emergency decrees to put down any challenge against him. Emergency
Decree No.l, which he issued on January 9, 1974, was the case in point for his
political use of such a decree.
It shall be prohibited for any person to deny, oppose, misrepresent, or defame the constitution of the Republic of Korea. Any person who violates or defames the present emergency measures shall be subject to arrest, detention, search or seizure, without warrant thereof, and shall be tried and sentenced in the emergency courts martial and shall be punished by imprisonment. ( as cited in Chun, 2003, p. 28)
With this unchallengeable power, Park’s regime arrested many people, sent them to
kangaroo courts, and executed eight people in April of 1975. In the face of such a
brutal and oppressive political situation, students, Christian leaders, political leaders,
Catholic priests, workers, and peasants began to join a pro-democracy movement
against the military regime.
On November 13, 1970, Chon Tae II, a labor worker and a union leader,
soaked himself in oil and ignited a fire in a labor protest. He turned into a fireball in
a second but he kept chanting, “Abide by labor laws” and “We are not machines.”
Even under the military regime, Korea had labor laws which guaranteed the basic
right of labor workers, but the regime had ignored the law. The shocking image of
his death shook the nation and became a wake-up call for many intellectuals, turning
their interests into labor issues.
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On August 9, 1979, more than 190 female textile workers of the Y.H.
Industrial Company went to the headquarter office of the oppositional party,
National Democratic Party (NDP), to stage a sit-in as a way to protest against their
company closure. On the third night, riot police stormed into the office and arrested
the protesters, NDP legislators, and reporters. In the middle of the violent arrests,
one female worker, Kim Kyong Suk, was killed and a hundred people were injured.
Kim (2000) declared that “this incident served as the most vivid indication of the
brutality, violence, and lack of legitimacy of the Park regime” (p. 62).
Opposition leader Kim Young Sam strongly denounced the regime and led a
protest. Civil organizations, students, and labor workers also joined the protest. In
the face of the popular movement against him, Park used his party legislators and
passed a resolution which stripped Kim Young Sam of his status as a representative
in the National Assembly. In response, thousands of citizens in Busan, Kim Young
Sam’s hometown, took to the streets, demanding Kim’s return and chanting anti-
Park slogans. The protest rapidly swept through the region and began to generate
anti-government rallies in adjacent cities. Again, the military regime declared
martial law to put down the protest but it exposed that the military regime had been
weakened and began to crumble. On October 26, 1979, Kim Jae Kyu, director of the
KCIA, shot down Park at a party, marking the end of the dictatorship.
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Economic Background in the 1960s and the 1970s
Park’s regime implemented an export-driven economy with foreign capital
from the United States and Japan and the motto was “development first, distribution
later.” In 1962, Park embarked on “The Five-Year Economic Development Program
for 1962-1966.” Later, the regime claimed that it achieved an annual economic
growth rate of 8.5% during that period (Lewis, 1988). The World Bank reported that
Korea's inflation-adjusted GNP tripled in each decade between 1961 and 1979
(Oberdorfer, 1997, p. 37). This rapid growth helped Korea to get out of poverty but
it didn’t come without sacrifice. For the growth, labor workers had to endure
extremely long working hours and low wages while peasants were suffering from
low product prices forced by the military regime as a way to control the low wage of
workers.
The rapid industrialization brought a change into labor forces in Korea. First
of all, the number of farmers decreased dramatically. In 1961, farmers were 53.6%
of the total population of the nation but the percentage dropped to 27% in 1980, and
this alienated population flooded into urban areas in search of jobs (Kang, 1994, p.
330). The increase of urban population became a source of cheap labor and many of
them found themselves in poor slums in cities.
Along with the explosive increase in workers' numbers, there was an
increase in organized labor. When the military regime allowed workers to organize
in 1961, the number of organized workers was 96,831 and the number soared to
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493,711 at the end of 1971 (Kang, 1994, p. 381). According to Kang, the organizing
rate reached 12.4%, which was quite low compared to other nations in 1970 (Japan:
34.5%, England: 48%, Western Germany: 35.4%, The United States: 29.4%). Kang
(1994) offered two reasons for the low rate. One was the severe oppression by the
military regime and companies. The other reason was that most workers were
working at small companies where organizing was extremely difficult. Yet, the
labor movement had been kept growing in spite of those hard conditions.
Even though the economic growth eased the level of poverty, most benefit of
the development went to the companies and foreign countries at the expense of
labor workers, peasants, and the urban poor. Under the export-driven economic
development plan, the Park regime gave low-interest loans and huge tax breaks to a
few privileged companies, making it easy for the companies to get profits. For
example, Jae-Il Hapsum, one representative company of the current Samsung group,
only paid $17 million out of over $10 billion in expenses to build its factories while
the bulk of money came from the loans through the military regime (Guro History
Research Center, 1990, p. 183). On top of such generous support, the regime
guaranteed a high domestic price of such companies’ products to compensate for
their loss in the international market, where they sold their product at a very low
price to meet the export goal set up by the regime.
The military regime heavily invested in labor-driven industries such as
textiles and manufacturing which developed countries wanted to avoid due to
environmental concerns. The regime boasted its growth rate as a great achievement
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but it put the nation in great debt because it had to buy machines and raw materials
to make its products. Since the regime didn’t have enough money to buy those
materials, they had to get massive loans from the United States and Japan. As a
result, the more goods the nation exported, the more debt it incurred.
Political Context in the 1980s
After the assassination of Park Chung Hee, Korean's hope for democracy
was blooming but the hope broke apart when another military general, Chun Doo
Hwan, seized power through a military coup. People took to the streets and General
Chun enforced martial law. On May 14, 1980, thousands of university students, who
came from 34 universities around the nation, waged street demonstrations,
denouncing the coup and insisting the removal of Chun. In addition, labor workers
began to actively organize themselves and the number of labor disputes during the
first five months of the year grew to 900, which was equivalent to the number of
labor disputes during Park’sYusin period, and the number reached 2,168 by the end
of the year (1973-1979) (Kim, 2000, p. 66).
On May 17, Chun extended martial law to the entire nation, banned all
political activities, closed universities, and arrested several politicians, including an
opposition leader, Kim Dae Jung. On May 18, university students organized rallies,
insisting on the release of Kim Dae Jung and the end of martial law. The
demonstration was especially strong and persistent in the city of Kwangju, which
was the political base of the arrested opposition leader. In response, Chun
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dispatched paratroopers and the special force attacked the demonstrators viciously
in the city. The brutality by the troopers enraged Kwangju citizens and the protests
exploded into massive rallies, spreading into adjacent cities. On May 20, a massive
rally was held on Kumnam Avenue where about 30,000-40,000 citizens took part.
The citizens who were shocked by the brutality of paratroopers responded with
aggressive actions. They set the television stations on fire which broadcasted false
information about the nature of the blood struggle in the city and they began to arm
themselves with the weapons they took from police departments (Ahn, 2003). It was
the beginning of a citizens’ army and the fighting between the military and the
citizens grew fierce and intensified.
On May 21, the troops retreated into the suburban area and the newly formed
Citizens Settlement Committee was formed to negotiate with the military. The
Committee made seven requests to solve the situation, as follows:
1. Martial law forces shall not be mobilized before negotiations are concluded.
2. All those arrested during the uprising shall be released.
3. The government will officially acknowledge the military’s excessive use of violence.
4. A guarantee of no retaliation after the settlement.
5. No charges will be brought against the people for their actions during the uprising.
6. The families of the dead will be compensated.
7. The protesters will put down their arms if these demands are satisfied. (Shin, 2003, Introduction, p. 16)
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Unfortunately, they failed to reach an agreement and the citizen’s army prepared for
the last battle in the city hall.
On May 27, military tanks roared into the city and the citizens’ army couldn’t
hold a candle to the military machinery and the uprising was crushed. According to
Brown (1980), the Martial Law Command announced that 170 people were dead
and 380 people were injured, but other sources estimated much larger casualties
around 2,000 (as cited in Shin, 2003, Introduction p. 17). Actually, even after two
decades of the uprising, people still don’t know how many people were killed. Yet,
the Kwangju uprising didn’t just go away. Rather, as Shin (2003) points out, it
continues to raise the illegitimacy of the Chun regime and it became a wake-up call
for Koreans engaged in the pro-democratic movement.
After the bloody suppression of the protest in Kwangju, Chun set up a
special committee for National Security Measures and began to crack down on the
opposition. The committee conducted a massive socialChunghwa (cleansing)
campaign, “forcing newspapers to fire antigovemment reporters and canceling
registration of 172 weeklies and monthlies publications, including well-known
dissident magazines” (Shin, 2003, p. 68). It was a preemptive measure to pave a
way for his presidency. He became president in August, churning out authoritarian
measures severely limiting basic human rights such as freedom of speech and
assembly.
In 1983, the Chun regime started to abate its tight oppression and allowed
professors and students who were expelled from universities due to their
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involvement in antigovernment protests to return to their universities. As for the
reasons, Kim (2000) pointed out that after implementation of strong authoritarian
measures to control the society such as the basic press law and national security law,
the Chun regime felt confident about their ability and the economic recovery during
the time boosted the confidence. Economic growth rate rose to 12.6% in 1983 from
3.7% in 1980 while the inflation rate dropped to 3.4% in 1983 from 28.7% in 1980
(Kim, 2000, p. 81).
The minjung movement had began to rise from the ashes of the Kwangju
uprising. In January 1982, several university students set fire to the United State’s
Cultural Center in Busan, blaming Washington for letting Chun kill innocent
citizens in Kwangju. The students claimed that the United States was at least an
accomplice in the bloodshed given that the United States controlled the military in
Korea. Later, students broke into the Cultural Center in Seoul in May, demanding a
full investigation on the Kwangju uprising and claiming U.S. responsibility. The
United States had been understood as a strong alley and friend among most Koreans
but Koreans began to question the relationship since the Kwangju uprising when
Washington turned a blind eye to the bloodshed of Kwangju citizens.
Students, professors, labor unions, and peasants continued to organize
themselves, taking fully advantage of deregulated space, and established the council
of Movement for People and Democracy in June 1984. The organization pledged to
work for “independent national economy, social justice, increased political
consciousness of the masses, and peaceful national reunification” (Kim, 2000, p. 84).
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On February 12,1985, Korea held an election for the National Assembly and
the Korea Democratic Party (NKDP) emerged as a main opposition party.
According to the National Election Committee, the NKDP gathered 29.26% of the
votes while the ruling party, the Democratic Justice Party, grabbed 35.25%. Another
opposition party, the Democratic Korean Party, obtained 19.7% of the votes (as
cited in Kim, 2000, p. 85). The total votes of the two opposition parties
outnumbered the ruling party and it clearly showed the dissatisfaction of the
populace. Boosted by the result, the NKDP andminjung movement groups kept
adding pressure on the military regime to accept the constitutional revision for direct
presidential election, but it was flatly refused by Chun.
On April 13, 1987, President Chun Do Hwan declared a moratorium on the
discussion of constitutional revision, which immediately caused strong resistance
around the nation. Students, labor workers, peasants, and other movement groups
joined the protests in major cities around the nation. In the middle of this political
turmoil, Park Chong Choi, a Seoul National University student, was tortured to
death in a police investigation, and it added more fuel to the fire of strong political
opposition against the military regime. In May 1987,minjung movement groups
established the National Movement Headquarters for Democratic Constitution and
massive rallies were organized. In this massive rally, Lee Han Yeol, a Yonsei
University student, was hit by a tear gas canister and lost his life. With his death, the
rallies were growing larger and larger and this time many middle-class citizens
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called necktie budae began to join the rallies. Lee Man Woo (1990) described the
situation as follows:
The protests, the largest since the April 19 uprising in 1960, continued for nearly three weeks. In clashes that spread from Seoul to some 30 cities, demonstrators were cheered on by office workers and ordinary citizens. Within the first two days, 738 policemen were injured....
By June 15, some 6,094 people had been detained. Korea’s universities and colleges went into summer vacation ahead of schedule. By June 18, downtown Seoul looked like a war zone. According to the national police headquarters, police officers fired 351,200 tear gas canisters from June 10 to June 26. That meant that an average of 20,660 canisters per day was fired in the 17-day period, (p. 37)
On June 29, 1987, Chun announced his concession and accepted the people’s
demands.
With the success of a democratic movement, the suppressed labor
movement under the military regime exploded to take advantage of this open space.
During July and August in 1987, there were 3,337 strikes and 75.5% of the
companies with over 1,000 employees went through strikes (Kang, 1994, p. 396).
The period was the largest strike season in Korea’s modem history, and it laid the
foundation for the democratic labor movement.
Kim (2000) points out two distinctive characteristics of this period called the
Great Labor Struggle: (1) the issues raised during the strikes went beyond
economical issues such as minimum wage, overtime pay, and paid vacation. Rather,
they focused on establishing democratic unions in the workplaces; and (2) the
strikes were organized spontaneously by ordinary workers and there was no central
organization.
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However, the success of the pro-democracy movement and the rapid
development of the labor movement experienced a serious setback when the
presidential election was held in December 1987. In spite of the people’s aspiration
for a united front against the ruling party candidate, Roh Tae Woo, handpicked by
Chun Doo Whan, two leaders of the opposition party failed to reach an agreement
on who was going to be the candidate for the opposition party, and internal
competition split the party into two parties led by two leaders.Minjung movement
groups pressured on two leaders to negotiate further to form the united front but
they failed. To make matters worse, theminjung movement also failed to make a
united front on whom it was going to support asminjung a candidate. As a result of
the failure, the ruling party candidate, Roh, won the election with 35.9% of the
popular vote while Kim Young Sam gathered 27.5% and Kim Dae Jung won 26.5%.
(Kim, 2000, p. 97)
Political Context from the 1990s to the Present
Even though Roh Tae Woo was elected through a presidential election, his
regime was considered a continuation of the military regime of Chun, and the
minjung movement continued to fight to build a more democratic society. In 1992,
Kim Young Sam, a long-time opposition leader, joined Roh’s party and became the
presidential candidate of the party. His departure was heavily criticized as a betrayal
for the cause of the pro-democracy movement but others argued that he did it to
change the ruling party from within.
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In December 1992, Kim won the presidential election and he stunned the
nation by implementing some reformative measures such as the “real name bank
account system” and the “investigation of wrongdoings by former political leaders
and military leaders.” Yet his reform measures had been weakened by the
conservatives in the party. In 1995, Kim’s government announced that it would not
seek to indict former president Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo on the charge of
insurrection in December 1979, saying “let history judge” the coup.
Once again, theminjung movement mobilized its forces. About 150
professors, criticizing the announcement, demanded a special law to prosecute the
coup leaders and to reinvestigate the Kwangju uprising in 1980. Thousands of
students around the nation boycotted their classes and took to the streets. On
September 30, the streets of 13 major cities in Korea were flooded with students,
workers, and citizens, demanding a special law to prosecute the ex-presidents. On
November 24, 1995, the Kim Young Sam government conceded to the demand and
ordered the party to draft the special law. Under the special law, 11 generals
including Chun and Roh were prosecuted and the two ex-presidents were jailed. The
ex-presidents were sentenced to death in the court regarding their roles in the coup
and the Kwangju massacre, but both were released by amnesty in December 1997.
In 1997, Korea swirled into an economic crisis, with the collapse of big
business conglomerates developed rapidly by government support. Foreign
investors pulled out their funds and the stock market plummeted. On December 3,
1997, the International Monetary Fund agreed to offer $57 billion dollars to Korea,
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with very stringent conditions on the regulation of financial sectors as well as
enforcing rapid capital and trade liberalization.
In December 1998, President Kim Dae Jung, considered as the most
progressive among the opposition leaders, became president, and led political and
economical reforms in the middle of an IMF economic crisis. Under his leadership,
Korea got out of the crisis quickly but he was criticized as an IMF man in Korea,
enforcing strict rules by the international organization, opening up the financing
market, and selling domestic companies to foreign companies with under-market
value.
President Kim, with the newly developed sunshine policy (engagement
policy), ambitiously worked hard to reestablish a mutual relationship with North
Korea. On June 13, 2000, he visited North Korea and held a summit with North
Korean leader Kim Chung II, which was the first meeting between two leaders since
the Korean War. In their historic meeting, the two leaders came to agreement that
both Koreas would work together for national unification, to strengthen the
economical cooperation, and to solve the problem of separated families by the
Korean War. With this effort to decrease the possible war on the Korean peninsula,
President Kim won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000.
The Korean Peasant League and the Peasant Movement in Korea
On April 24 in 1990, the Korean Peasant League (KPL) was bom out of the
continued organizing efforts of peasants in theminjung movement against a military
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dictatorship. With the increasing number of peasants wanting their unions to
represent their interests in the middle of agriculture market openings, the demand
for a national organization to coordinate the organizing was greatly needed. In its
declaration, the KPL claimed that peasants had been ignored against their social role
as a producer of food as much as labor workers who had been ignored in spite of
their role as producers of goods.
The KPL blamed the military regimes and economic imperialism for the
poverty of the peasants. The military regimes expelled peasants from their
hometowns for the regime’s economic development plans which required cheap
labor forces and then opened agriculture market with no safety net for the peasants.
As a result, peasants became either low-wage workers in cities or were left behind
in their hometowns to suffer from economic hardships.
In its continued struggles, theminjung movement had succeeded to build a
civilian government in the 1990s but the civilian governments continued to keep the
trend of“Kaebang Nong Jong” (opening agricultural market) and“Chunup Nong
Yooksungj' (support and encourage big-scale farming at the expense of small family
farming) under the influence of the so called economic neo-liberalism. Especially,
the pressure for opening agriculture markets kept growing since Korea underwent
structural adjustment under the International Monetary Fund after she fell into an
economical crisis in 1997.
Under this situation, the KPL led the peasants’ struggle against the
agricultural market opening proposed by World Trade Organization (WTO). In the
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report about the impact of agriculture market opening under the WTO on South and
East Asian countries by La Via Campesina, an international peasant organization,
the KPL pointed out the detrimental changes among Korean peasant communities
by the government statistics. First, Korea was losing the ability to produce foods
enough to feed themselves, as shown in Table 1. The rate was 80.5 % in 1970 but it
dropped to 25.3% in 2004.
Table 1
Rate of Foodstuff Self-Sufficiency
1970 1980 1990 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004
Rate 80.5 56.0 43.1 29.7 31.1 30.4 26.9 25.3
Source: Ministry oj' Agriculture and Forestry, Republic o' Korea, 2004, as cited in La Via Campesina (2005, p. 12).
Note: unit: %
Second, it was hard to make a living with farming so many peasants were forced to
leave their hometowns in search for jobs in cities. As a result, the farming
population is dwindling, as shown in Table 2, and the debts of farmer households
are increasing,as shown in Table 3. Table 4 illustrates the reality of aging
populations in rural areas. As of 2003, 53.7% of the population was over 60.
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Summary
After the Korean War, Korea was left in rubble and it suffered severe
oppression under military regimes from the 1960s to the 1980s. Yet, Koreans
continued to fight against the oppression and successfully elected civilian
governments during the 1990s. In addition, Korea achieved great economical
success in a short period of time. It was a poor agrarian country in the 1950s, but
Korea has become a world leader in producing automobiles, ships, semiconductors,
and mobile phones.
During the oppressive period, the conflict between the Koreans and the
military regimes was violent and fierce. Theminjung movement aimed at toppling
the military regimes and seizing the state power to bring democracy to the nation.
During the 1990s, the Koreanminjung movement had been weakened with the
inauguration of a civilian government in 1992, and thesimin movement took the
center stage of social movements in Korea. Unlike theminjung movement, the simin
movement did not intend to topple the existing government. Rather, it turned to
reformist measures to institutionalize democracy in politics and economics.
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Table 2
Change of Farming Population
Farmer household Farming population Family size (people)
1970 2,483,318 14,421,730 5.81
1980 2,155,073 10,826,748 5.02
1995 1,500,745 4,851,080 3.23
2000 1,383,468 4,031,065 2.91
2003 1,264,431 3,530,102 2.79
2004 1,240,406 3,414,551 2.75 Source: Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Republic of Korea, 2004, as cited in La Via Campesina (2005, p. 12).
Note: Unit: 1,000
Table 3
The Debt of Farmer Flouseholds
1970 1980 1990 1993 2000 2001 2002 2003 Farmer house 16 339 4,734 6,828 20,207 20,376 19,898 26,619 hold debt Source: Ministry o1' Agriculture and Forestry, Republic ol'Korea, 2004, as cited in La Via Campesina (2005, p. 13).
Note: unit: 1,000
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Table 4
Aging Population
Total farmer More than Less than 30 30-49 50-59 households 60 1981 2,030 104 (5.1) 936 (46.1) 555 (27.3) 435 (21.5)
1990 1,767 37 (2.) 594 (33.6) 584 (33.0) 552 (31.3)
1995 1,501 12 (0.8) 406 (27.1) 447 (29.8) 635 (42.3)
2000 1,383 7 (0.5) 322 (23.3) 348 (25.2) 706 (51.0)
2001 1,354 4 (0.3) 274 (20.2) 326 (24.1) 750 (55.4)
2002 1,280 3 (0.2) 252 (19.7) 299 (23.3) 727 (56.8)
2003 1,264 2 (0.2) 240(18.9) 293 (23.2) 730 (53.7) Source: Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Republic of Korea, 2004, as cited in La Via Campesina (2005, p. 12).
Note: unit: 1,000
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ADULT EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
Introduction
Many adult educators argue that the current adult education history in North
America omits some important traditions of adult education's role in workers’
education, socialist education, Native American education, and Black education, as
well as the progressivism of Lindeman (Courtney, 1989; Cunningham, 1989;
Heaney, 2000; Shied, 1995). They believe that adult education played a key role to
bring about social change, and the exclusion of its historic role will confine the role
of adult education and the role of adult educators within the boundary of the status
quo. (Adams, 1975; Alexander, 1997; Krajnc, 2000; Lovette, 1988). Courtney
(1989) challenges the exclusion and poses a question:
We ignore history at our peril, for by doing so we are unable to look at contemporary American society and to ask, Where do adult educators play a role: And do they contribute to changing or maintaining the status quo? (p. 21)
Cunningham (1998) also raises the questions: “Do we educate participants to
perform in the workplace, or do we educate participants for engagement in
constructing a more democratic and egalitarian society?” (p. 16). She stresses that
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adult education played a key role to bring social transformation historically though
“this fact has been largely ignored” (Cunningham, 1989, p.40).
However, in the current field of adult education, many adult educators place
more emphasis on individual development at the expense of social responsibility as
adults in a society (Apps, 1989; Cunningham, 1993; Gonzi & Hager, 1996;
Podeschi, 2000; Rubenson, 1989; Sandlin, 2004). As a result, the individual
becomes isolated and the inter-connection between personal development and social
transformation in their collective actions for a more democratic society has been
discarded and ignored. Alexander and Martin (1995) exhort the trend, claiming that
“the retreat into technicism, managerialism and a debased form of professionalism is
a betrayal of adult and community educations’ moral purpose and its historical roots
in the democratic movement” (p. 85).
Social Movements as a Place of “Personal Transformation"
Recently, modest literature has emerged over new social movements, such as
the environmental movement, student movement, and peace movement. Finger
(1989) should be acknowledged as an initiator to begin the discussion. Based on the
theory of postmodernism, he differentiates new social movements (NSM) from old
social movements (OSM), arguing that “in the new movements it is the person who
defines his or her relation to modern society” (p. 15). He also insists that analyzing
new social movements from this perspective will give adult educators some insights
to conceptualize adult learning theories.
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First and foremost, Finger (1989) argues that NSM challenged the modernity
represented by rationality and its ideas of freedom, justice, and emancipation.
According to him, new movements, such as the green movement, the peace
movement, and religious movements came to rise in face of the crisis caused by
modernity while the OSM had used to focus on a new power relationship. From his
perspective, the OSM basically has its origin in “the 19th century project of a
modem society” and it suggests that the social problems were caused by “unjust and
unequal power relationship” (Finger, 1989, p. 16). On the contrary, the NSM gives
up the old ideas and fights for “a new, personal relationship with modernization, in
particular with its core components of rationality, science, technology, and (State)
politics” (Finger, 1989, p. 17).
Finger (1989) focuses on personal transformation in his analysis, arguing
that the NSM abandons the emancipatory aims in search for personal transformation.
He stresses that OSM put too much emphasis on changing the power relationship so
that they ended up mobilizing people with less concerns on people’s personal
transformation. “To enlighten the actor through education is an important means of
achieving this goal of political emancipation” (p. 17). “The conception of the
individual among these old movements is highly ambiguous; ultimately, the
recipient of this education is not taken seriously” (p. 18). Based on this analysis on
the NSM, he (1989) argues that “in the crisis of modernity, the person rather than
history becomes the subject of adult learning” (p. 21).
His analysis on OSM can be summarized as follows:
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It seeks to mobilize mass movements in order to put political pressure on the State, on the political system, and on a variety of institutions. In OSM, education is but a means of achieving political goals. The recipient of this education is not taken seriously, (pp. 17-18)
In retrospect of the past social movements, his criticism made a point that
the OSM failed to embrace personal transformation as an essential part of the
movement, but using this point to make a distinction between the OSM and the
NSM seems irrelevant and over exaggerated. In doing so, he fails to observe the
relationship between the OSM and the NSM as both political and collective acts.
Rather, his criticisms should be considered as an important lesson from OSM in
which ideology prevailed over personal concerns.
Freire (2000) points out the same problem in his famous book, Pedagogy of
the Oppressed, in which he asserts that the oppressed must become the subjects of
movements through dialogue. They should not left behind as the followers of some
leaders. “The revolution is made neither by the leaders for the people, nor by the
people for the leaders, but by both acting together in unshakable solidarity” (p. 123).
Some intellectuals, considering themselves as the leaders of movements, were
preoccupied with their political agenda and often made the oppressed the objects of
mass mobilization to achieve their political goals in OSM (Wainright, 1994). This
failure must be overcome in this new era unfolded by the enormous technical
developments and fast globalization processes.
Finger (1989) also stresses the importance of cultural transformation,
accusing the OSM of being preoccupied with taking over power structure. This
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point was also instructive to extend the scope of old social movements. This cultural
aspect of social movements is now getting much attention from many adult
educators.
One of the key concepts of Marx’s social analysis was historical materialism,
and he explains the concept in his contribution to the critique of political economy
as follows:
In the social production that men carry on, they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and intellectual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men which determines their existence; it is on the contrary their social existence which determines their consciousness. (Marxism, 2007)
Confined by his era when capitalism began to emerge out of feudalism, Marx puts
more emphasis on the economic base than the superstructures, such as state, army,
police, and other apparatuses. He believes that the transformation of the economic
base would naturally lead to the destruction of the superstructures standing on the
economic base. On the other hand, Gramsci (1971) asserts that the superstructures
can exert power on the economic base and that the destruction of the economic base
cannot be followed by the automatic destruction of the superstructures. Based on
this notion, he argues that the oppressed must counterattack the cultural hegemony
to bring social changes in civil society existing in the superstructures.
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How to understand the relationship between the superstructure and economic
base was a major debate among the Marxists during 1970s (Youngman, 2000, p. 21).
Now, in light of the new dimension of capital development and new social
movements, critical educators and sociologists seek to go beyond the limitation of
Marx, and this effort is well described in Smart's words.
In the works of Marx and Engels it is clear that the economy is determinant in the final instance and therefore the superstructures are in some sense determined. However, the latter are accorded some degree of effectivity which is not simply reducible to the economy, (as cited in Youngman, 2000, p. 30)
Those were the useful lessons obtained from the precious experience of old social
movements, but the lessons must not be used to polarize NSM and OSM. As Martin
(1999) argued, “They are not mutually exclusive and the boundaries between them
are often fluid and permeable” (p. 13). Rather, the lessons can be used to advance
social movements by developing new theories with new perspectives (Crowther,
1999).
Additionally, Finger fails to relate the nature of modernity to the
development of capitalism. In other words, he fails to notice that the crisis of
modernity was caused by the crisis of capitalism. In this regard, it is natural for him
to understand NSM as apolitical acts, but on the contrary NSM can be understood as
political acts, revealing the new aspect of social movements and extending the scope
of movements along with the development of capitalism. Social movements must
not be reified in terms of a specific frame such as Marxism. Instead, social
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movements should be understood as the active process to define and extend their
vision in a dialectical process against the oppressor.
Social Movements as "Learning Sites"
Welton (1993) raises questions against Finger's ideas philosophically based
on Habermas. In his article, Welton (1993) asserts the following:
1. NSM actors did not reject modem idea of emancipation
2. NSM must be understood as collective actors
3. NSM are revitalizing political life in late capitalist society (p. 153).
Furthermore, he argues that social movements are “learning sites” where people can
transform themselves as well as society.
Welton (1993) shared the view with Finger in terms of the crisis of
modernity. “The classic revolutionary vision has now been discredited, and the
proletariat removed from the center of the world-changing stage” (p. 153). However,
Welton (1993) criticizes Finger's postmodern position, arguing he polarized the old
and new movements artificially to extract new visions (p. 153).
Unlike Finger, Welton (1993) discovers the cause of NSM in “the particular
form of crisis of welfare-state capitalism” (p. 155). According to him, welfare-state
capitalism tried to regulate everything in society with institutional apparatus but it
caused contradictory results. “The more its functions and responsibilities expanded,
the more its capacity to make binding decisions was debased” (Welton, 1993, p.
154). The result generated a crisis in “lifeworld” and NSM could be understood as
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the people’s resistance to the destruction of “lifeworld” caused by the interference
of the state. It was a response to “deprivation which affects very fundamental levels
of physical, personal, and social existence,” in Offe's words (as cited in Welton,
1993, p. 156). Furthermore, it was a protest to fight against “exclusion form
decision-making, dominance of bureaucracies, and dependency on prepackaged
lifestyle scripts” (Welton, 1993, p. 160). As solutions for this crisis, Welton insists
organizing grass-roots movements and a party which could voice citizens' concerns.
In organizing grass-roots movements, he stresses the importance of
“unblocking communicative learning process” where people actively participated,
made decisions based on mutual agreements, and acted together to achieve
collective goals (Welton, 1993, p. 160). Collins (1998) also assures that this notion
of communicative action by Habermas gives a rationale to justify the effort for
“seeking the means for reaching decisions in a genuinely participatory democratic
manner” (p. 69).
Communicative action as a process of achieving a democratic decision
process reinforced Friere's idea of dialogue. For Freire (2000), dialogue is “the
encounter in which the united reflection and action of the dialoguers are addressed
to the world which is to be transformed and humanized” (p. 88). In dialogue, the
oppressed can develop their consciousness and realize their power as subjects who
are capable of changing a society as well as themselves. Horton's experience (1990)
in Highlander eloquently reveals how much empowering the dialogue was.
They want to talk about their own experience. Then other people join and
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say, “Ah ha, I had an experience that relates to that.” So pretty soon you get everybody's experience coming in centered around that one person's experience, (p. 168)
In this regard, Welton's argument of NSM as collective acts and learning sites found
firm ground and seemed appropriate.
However, in the face of the crisis of “lifeworld,” he mainly targets the
“state” as the destroyer of “lifeworld.” With this focus, he fails to point out the
power of capital economy which actually exerted a great impact on the state. At this
point, he reveals the same mistake Finger showed in his article. The State now has
more independent power to intervene in the lifeworld but the state is not totally free
from the influence of capitalism. Foley (1999) criticizes the weakness, arguing that
“The real crisis of our time is a crisis of capitalism as it undergoes one of its
periodic restructurings in order to become yet more exploitative, productive and
profitable” (p. 135).
Social Movements as “Cognitive Praxis”
Holford (1995) tries to go beyond Welton's understanding of social
movements as learning sites with a new approach which understood social
movements in terms of “cognitive praxis.” He posits that “organizational knowledge
and movement intellectuals” will be the key to understand social movements in the
context of adult education. In this understanding of social movements, he insists that
this new approach “holds possibilities for the study of adult education” (p. 101).
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His notion of “cognitive praxis” is based on the work of Eyerman and
Jamison. In their book, Eyerman and Jamison (1991) argue that they look at the
significance of social movements “not merely as a challenge to established power,
but also and more so as a socially constructive force, as a fundamental determinant
of human knowledge” (p. 48). Based on this notion, Holford (1995) criticizes the
functionalistic understanding of knowledge which regarded knowledge as “a
product of division of labor” (p. 101).
In this regard, Holford (1995) argues that the cognitive approach can offer
two important things to adult education. He (1995) states:
First, there is the appreciation of social movements as socially important sources of knowledge as well as profound sites of learning ....Moreover, it suggests that we can begin to understand these characteristic forms of knowledge through analyzing the social movements which have shaped a given society, (p. 104)
With these points in his mind, he stresses the importance of studying organizational
knowledge of social movements. For him, this knowledge is “identifiable and
researchable” (p. 105). Holford, however, gives a cautious warning over those
studies in that he argued that researchers should look at those movements critically.
In the discussion of “movement intellectuals”, he points out two aspects.
One is “the role of adult educator” and the other is “the role of adult education” in
social movements. The notion of “movement intellectual,” comes from Gramsci's
idea of organic intellectuals. For Gramsci(1971), “All men are intellectuals, one
could therefore say; but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals (p.
9).” His notion of intellectuals doesn't mean intelligentsia, and the role of them was
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“a reflexive one, growing in and in return shaping the politics, organization and
vision of the class” (as cited in Holford, 1995, p. 103). Following this analysis,
Holford argues that if adult educators work collectively, they can become
“movement intellectuals” who can enhance social movements.
His point of social movement as a source of new knowledge seems very
useful to point out the nature of knowledge construction. For many people, currently,
the only reliable source of knowledge is science, and scientific research methods
have penetrated into all fields of academic studies, including adult education. From
the perspective of this trend, knowledge can be produced only by “those who were
technically trained to conduct it, such as faculty members, graduate students, and
research associates” (Deshler & Grudens-Schuck , 2000, p. 595). The myth must be
tom away given its harmfulness of ignoring common peoples’ knowledge obtained
through their lived experience.
Collins (1998) argues that Harbermas' distinction between “lifeworld” and
“system” also could be used to break this myth. In his argument, he argues (1998)
that “the lifeworld which sustained traditional community values” has been
colonized by the system world represented by “technical efficiency and bureaucratic
management” and that this can be reversed by peoples' “communicative action” (p.
71). Thus, the new understanding of social movements as a place of creating new
knowledge gives its long overdue credit to the collaborative acts of the oppressed.
However, focusing on the role of movement intellectuals in social
movements may cause the old problem of OSM, which was elitism represented by
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Lenin's notion of the strong single-party leadership. Many critical adult educators
identified the problem and criticized it (Finger, 1989; Freire, 2000; Freire & Horton,
1990,).
Social Movements and Organized Labor
Of the three peoples mentioned previously, no one pays attention to
organized labor and the development of capitalism, which are crucial to
understanding social contexts where social movements take place and adult
education plays a role.
Capitalism, since its development from a feudal society, has kept changing
itself into a better form of exploitation with more complicated and sophisticated
ways. At the beginning, the way of exploitation in capitalism was simple, just
making workers work more time. In the face of increasing labor hours, labor
workers as a class began to resist the greedy exploitation of capital, insisting on
proper working hours a day to recharge them with rests. Marx well describes the
struggle over working days in the Capital volume 1. To put it simply, the current
nine-to-five working hours do not come from the largess of capital. Rather, it is the
result of active, sometimes passive, and persistent workers' resistance. Since then,
capital has been accumulated tremendously along with the development of
technology, and it began to redistribute a small amount of the wealth to a few
workers, resulting in the emergence of the middle class.
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In addition, capital went to underdeveloped countries around the world,
colonized the nations, and usurped all resources, throwing the countries into the
vicious circle of hunger and poverty. As a result, the strong resistance from the
underdeveloped countries has begun to rise. This is a historical scene Marx couldn't
witness in his time. Marx predicts that the natural development of capitalism will
produce its oppositional force which actually will destroy the producer, capital itself.
But reality turns out differently: the oppositional force, proletariat, has not been
formed as a class and the power of capital gets stronger around the world.
In a state of capital development called “imperialism,” workers in the
developed countries cannot emancipate themselves as long as they benefit
themselves at the expense of workers in the underdeveloped countries. Partially, this
could be the reason the workers in the developed countries fail to form themselves
as a unified class. However, workers still hold their historical role as a leading group
in social movements in various continents such as Asia, Africa, and Latin America
in the presence of capitalism. The notion of imperialism also has been rising in this
resistance from the countries in the region to clearly understand the current political
and economical situation in this global world. From this point of view, organized
labor is still in charge of social movements though its role has been diminished in a
new stage of history.
Spencer (1995), based on his analysis of Canadian labor movements, makes
a strong argument about the important role of organized labor in social movements.
He sides with Welton in a point that Finger overemphasized individual aspects of
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NSM at the expense of social responsibility. However, he points out that Welton
ignored labor unions' efforts to defend “lifeworld and ecosystem” and therefore has
privileged new social movements over old social movements. Yet, it is no wonder
for Welton not to mention organized labor considering his philosophical base. He
built his arguments mostly based on Habermas, who paid comparatively less
attention to the economical base or the development of capitalism as the process of
production of exploitation. Unlike Welton, Spencer (1995) rightfully makes a clear
argument that “labor unions remain the single most important provider of non-
vocational social purpose adult education for working people” (p. 37).
Spencer (1995) suggests three reasons which contribute to the negligence of
labor education in the field of adult education. Those reasons are:
1. Unions have been critically examined and found wanting.
2. Little is known about labor education in Canada.
3. Many writers on the potency of NSMs (and by implication the impotence of the old) are influenced by the failure of United States labor to retain union membership (down to 17 percent of the non-agricultural workforce) and to influence political and social affairs, (p. 33)
Of those reasons, the third one symbolizes the current narrow view of some adult
educators in North America. They are so preoccupied with their countries that they
are failing to pay enough attention to other countries where adult education directly
links to the rich and successful labor movements. The election result of Brazil,
where a long-time labor leader was elected as president, is a good example to show
its significant role. Schied (1993) also points out the problem of neglecting labor
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movements in current adult education, arguing in the preface to his book that “this
denial of past experiences is one of the central ways in which the dominant society
limits the possibility of changes.”
Spencer acknowledges that the negligence on the labor movement was
caused by partly the labor unions' failures of going beyond their own interests for
the common cause. However, he insists that “labor unions remain the single most
important provider of non-vocational social purpose adult education for working
people” and must not be ignored (p. 37). Therefore, both labor unions and NSM
embraced each other's concerns to win in a defense of “lifeworld.” “Old and new
social movements can learn together and from each other how best to protect the
threatened lifeworld and ecosystem” (Spencer, 1995, p. 40). Post-Marxists express
the same concern and they call for the “alliance of various autonomous social
movements” (Youngman, 2000, p. 25).
Transformative Learning in Social Movements
Phyllis Cunningham, in a Gramscian perspective, stresses the social
dimension of transformative learning, arguing that the current literature in
transformative learning in North America failed to analyze the learning process of
adults in a social context. She (1998) argues:
The individual in the North American understanding of that concept is almost disembodied from the society which frames her consciousness or provides cultural meaning to existence. This utilization of the “individual” as the unit of social analysis is so ingrained in adult education practice the
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psychologization of adult education practice (Rubenson, 1989) is not easily recognized by most practitioners, (p. 15)
Rather, she suggests (1998) understanding an individual as a “biography,” which
meant that “an individual is contextualized in the history, culture, and the social
fabric of the society in which she lives” (p. 15). For her, personal transformation
and social transformation go together and the artificial separation of the two doesn’t
make sense. Thus the role of adult education for building a democratic civil society
becomes the key issue and it directly connects to the transformative learning of the
adults engaging in the process (Mayo, 1997). In this regard, social movements
become the “the natural home for educating adults and building civil society,” and
they naturally lead to the need for the critical analysis of the transformative learning
of the adult in social movements.
She emphasizes that the critical analysis of transformational learning in
social movements must come from praxis. As a good example, she explores the
learning process of the participants in a Chicago community-based organization and
follows the process of the bottom-up leadership development (Cunningham & Curry,
1997). She understands the bottom-up leadership development process as a process
of developing “organic intellectuals.”
In relation to the debate about the OSM and the NSM, Cunningham rejects a
post-modern relativism in the understanding of social movements which
distinguished the NSM from the OSM. Rather, she regards it as a call for alliance
among various social groups and she accepts the possible contribution of the NSM.
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Yet, she (1998) points out that “there must be a critical examination of the privilege
of those with affluence and white skins who make up these movements” (p. 21).
Summary
The emerging literature about social movements in North America is a
welcoming sign to revitalize the historical role of adult education and the role of
adult educators in promoting social justice and collective learning in social
movements. The effort also brings back the connection between individual learners
and society, going beyond psychological focus and putting them in social contexts
where the learning takes place (Holst, 2004; Lander, 2005; Scott, 1992). In spite of
this positive contribution of the emerging literature to understand social movements
as a place of adult learning and a place of creating new knowledge, little research
has been done to explore specific social movements in detail.
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SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND MINJUNG EDUCATION IN KOREA
Introduction
Starting in the 1970s, the wordminjung gained wide currency among the
intellectuals in Korea. During this period, Korea suffered under a brutal military
regime while going through rapid industrialization by the regime. In an unbelievably
short time, Korea transformed herself into an industrialized country from a poor
agrarian society. The frenzied industrialization broke off the traditional Korean
lifestyle and forced many peasants to leave for cities in search of jobs. In the cities,
peasants became low-paid workers, ending up living in ghettos in the cities.
Under this politically oppressed and economically deprived situation,
progressive intellectuals sought for ideas to build a more democratic and
economically sustainable society. First of all, they tried to analyze the Korean
political system scientifically with the help of social theories, and came to the
conclusion that intellectuals should work withminjung to bring social changes to
Korea. Minjung was identified as the subject of social change in Korea andminjung
must be mobilized to fulfill its historical mission. In this context,minjung education
to mobilize minjung was in urgent need among the progressive educators in Korea.
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Different Approaches in Understanding the ConceptMinjung of
Minjung education means education forminjung, and it would be
appropriate to define the concept ofminjung first before delving intominjung
education.Minjung has been defined variously with different emphasis depending
on the approaches during the period. Kim Sung Jae (1985) articulates that there are
three approaches to understand the concept minjung:of a social science approach,
an historical approach, and a Christian approach.
Social Science Approach
The social science approach tries to understand the concept based on class
analysis and social alienation theory. Han Wan Sang, a sociologist, and Park Hyun
Chae, an economist, are the representatives of the social science approach. Han
argues that structural inequality is innate in the power relation of society and so the
conflict between the rulers and the ruled is inevitable.
Han (1985) argues that the minjung are alienated politically, economically,
and culturally even though they are the majority of a society. Based on the analysis,
he articulates that there are three types ofminjung : political minjung, economical
minjung, and culturalminjung. He tries to understand the alienation minjungof in a
society from various aspects rather than focusingon class analysis as Marxdid. Kim
(1995) elaborates Han’s point.
The specific characteristics of ruled and ruling groups are therefore determined according to each social order (feudal, capitalist, or communist)
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and other factors such a as religion or ethnicity. The question is, which of these orders or means will dominate society as the most powerful? The nature of society thus changes automatically once the characteristics of the two juxtaposed social groups are changed, (p. 49)
Han’s (1985) view seems similar to Freire’s social analysis in a way that he
dichotomizes social conflict between the ruler and the ruled, and that he identifies
the ruled in a dual position. For Freire, the oppressed need to develop their own
consciousness to be the subject of their lives and history. Han also believes that
minjung had two characters: sleepingminjung and awakeningminjung. The former
are minjung who don’t recognize their status as subjects of history and they can’t
see through the oppression. They lived in self-depreciation and pessimism. The
latter are minjung who developed consciousness and they can relate their personal
suffering to the social system. Awakeningminjung can articulate how they were
marginalized by the rulers and began to work together to change the oppressed
situation. He believes that intellectuals can be a part ofminjung.
Park Hyun Chae (1978), an economic analyst, definesminjung based on
class analysis. His definition minjungof consists of mainly three classes: labor
workers, farmers, and the urban poor. Park (1988) argues that the development of
capitalism gave birth to minjung in Korea. According to Kim (1995), Park assumes
that the development of capitalism comes with the disintegration of farmers, and he
categorizes farmers into six groups: (1) agricultural proletariat and wage laborers;
(2) semi-proletariat or petty farmers, (3) tenant farmers, (4) medium-scale farmers,
(5) large-scale farmers, and (6) large-scale landowners. Of these groups, the first
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four groups were forced to give up their work in the developmental process of
capitalism and became labor workers and urban poor. As Marx sees the inevitable
emergence of the proletariat in the development of capitalism, Park finds the natural
development ofminjung in the development of Korean capitalism. Yet, Park defines
labor class as the key group of minjung since the conflict between labor worker and
capital was a fundamental problem in a capitalist society. Hong (2003) points out
that his class analysis later made an influence on student activists who tried to
analyze Korean society based on Marxism, but Kim (1995) criticizes his class
analysis because it had several flaws.
First, it contradicts the Korean national ideal of fraternity; for by defining the minjung as the proletariat he leaves no room for reconciliation with capitalist elements and intrinsically rejects the possibility of national unity, creating merely an exclusionary proletarianism. Moreover, the notion of minjung is much more complex than that outlined in Park’s theory and has had a much longer history than the process of proletarianization in Korea on which Park’s thinking is focused, (p. 57)
In the same regard, Han San Jin (1987) criticizes Park’s definition, which narrowed
the scope of minjung in Korean history, insisting that the concept minungof should
be extended to include the middle class. Hong (2003) understands Han’s extended
definition ofminjung as an effort to reflect the Korean situation in the 1980s when
the so-called white collar joined a democratic movement.
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Historical Approach
A historical approach reflects the criticism against the social science
approach and tries to understandminjung as a historical being instead of defining
minjung in a social science analysis. Song Kun Ho, Ahn Byung Jik, and Kim Yong
Bok are the key members of this approach. Song Kun Ho (1984) stresses that
minjung came out of the unique experience of Korea or other colonized countries.
Those countries, unlike the West, didn’t have time to develop their own national
states, and they were colonized by the Western countries so that the Western style of
democracy couldn’t come up in those colonized countries. In those nations, strong
oppositional forces had been shaping up to fight against colonialism and Song Kun
Ho calls the force minjung. Minjung is not a rigid definition for him and he tries to
understandminjung as a historical being.
Ahn Byung Jik (1984) claims that it is tricky to defineminjung in social
scientific terms. For him, minjung are the majority of society but they are
marginalized. He adds thatminjung are different from the simple majority of society
in a way that they consider themselves as subjects of history. He also claims that
minjung is a concept developed in colonized countries whereminjung waged fights
against imperialism. Kim (1985) points out that Ahn understood thatminjung would
disappear after they achieved their historical purpose.
Kim Yong Bok (1984) argues that the efforts to defineminjung are
meaningless. He says thatminjung can not be defined and should not be defined.
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According to him, theminjung defines themselves with their life stories, not by
abstract definitions. For him,minjung lives beyond social structure and they exist
even when society, ideology, and political structure disappear. He argues:
The question is what differences exist betweenminjung and proletariat. Proletariat had been come up in the economical analysis butminjung is determined by politics. Politics should be understood in a broad sense including economics. Philosophically, proletariat as a subject of history is confined by economical and historical determinism.minjung Yet is not limited by such barriers.Minjung, as a subject of history, transcend the barriers, creating a new history as well as unfolding her story, (p. 107)
Christian Approach
The Christian approach comes from minjung theology, which was influenced
by liberation theology in Latin America. Liberation theology challenged the
conservative theology led by the West and sought to understand the Bible in its
work with the oppressed. In a same way,minjung theology tried to work with
minjung and Ahn Byong Mu, Seo Nam Dong, and Mun Dong Hwan played a key
role in establishing this approach. Ahn understandsminjung as a crowd who always
stayed with Jesus, to whom Jesus always paid attention. Seo definesminjung as the
subject of their lives and history but they become sinners due to the systemical
oppression. He explains this concept in quoting Kim Ji Ha,
They work hard to make food to eat and house to live. They produce what they consume.When their countrywas in dangerby foreign countries, they didn’t hesitate to risk their lives to defense their country. Thisminjung is but they were alienated from political power which made them sinners, (as cited in Kim, 1985, p. 86)
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Mun stresses the historical experience ofminjung in the oppressed situation.
He (1985) claims that minjung is those who don’t have anything because of
continued alienation and exploitation. Commonly, they believe that people are equal
in the Biblical sense and see the role of Jesus as a good example of working with
minjung. Jesus was a realization of hope and aspiration ofminjung for them. Hong
(2003) well summarizes the characters of minjung theory during the time as follows:
1. The concept ofminjung pre-existed in history before the academic efforts to define the meaning.
2. The concept emphasized the double consciousness ofminjung : potential capability as subject of history and domesticated one.
3. In a way to realize the revolutionary potential ofminjung, consciousness- raising had been widely discussed.
4. The role of intellectuals had been seriously contemplated and encouraged in consciousness-raising ofminjung. (p. 20- 21)
Even though there were minor differences in different approaches, the
common understanding emerged about minjung.the It was understood as a
confederation of different classes shaped in a fight for liberation from social
oppression throughout Korean history, and the role of intellectuals was stressed to
raise the consciousness ofminjung. In this regard, the concept ofminjung refused to
accept the economical notion of Marxism in which the labor class automatically
became the subject of social change.
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Minjung Education in the 1960s and the 1970s
The rapid industrialization process during the period created a number of
labor workers, and the labor issues took the center stage ofminjung education in the
1970s. The number of student activists engaging in the labor movement also began
to rise. In addition, theminjung movement began to organize the peasants and urban
poor, but their roles were more limited due to the very oppressive political situation
than the Christian organizations in terms of resources which they could utilize.
Yahaks, night schools, were another place ofminjung education during this
period. Inyahaks, university students offered classes forminjung to access
education so that they could find jobs. Initially, the school took the supportive
position of formal education with the same subjects as formal schools but the
contents began to change with the development of the pro-democracy movement.
Christian M inium Education
The Christian movement was based on a religious belief with which the
educators were trying to build a new society where people, “bom with the form of
God,” can find its right place in a society (Chung, 1998, p. 165). In addition, it was
a kind of evangelism to get more Christians with the growing number of labor class
in the course of the rapid economic development by a military regime (Chung,
1998). Lots of institutions were built with those aims, and they worked with labor
workers, urban poor, and peasants. At first, those institutions' emphasis was put on
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general education and leisure education, but later some of the institutions developed
into a more critical education, joining a resistance against a military regime which
suppressed even basic human rights.
Lee (1985) and Han (2001) stress the role of the religious groups in
developingminjung education in this period. Additionally, Lee (1985) explains that
the religious approach to minjung education regarded it as a process in thatminjung
develop their consciousness, transform them, and change a society. The social
revolution by minjung was considered as a realization of the will of God. Clark
(1995) explains,
Minjung theology would not deny that God’s will is what determines history; but it would add that God wants things to change and that Christian believers are the instruments of his will. They are therefore called to fight evil and to position themselves between oppressive political and economic structures and their victims—namely the working poor of Korea’s cities and villages, (p. 92)
Cho (1985) points out that Korean Christians had a chance to reflect on their
roles under the oppressive military rule from which theminjung was mostly
suffering and began to work more closely withminjung. They came to believe that
minjung’s problems were also their problems.
Cho (1985) also explains the biblical base of religious minjung education.
Minjung education method in Christianminjung education traced back to the way Jesus educatedminjung. Jesus came to minjung and lived among them. He shared hope,lives, and struggles with them. That is why he was killed by the haves who were afraid of minjung. (p. 276)
He (1985) continues to explain the purpose ofminjung education: (1) helpminjung
recognize they were capable of solving their problems by themselves, (2) help
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minjung make their own organizations based on democracy and participation, and
(3) raise their self-confidence and take action (p. 268).
Catholic Nodong Chongnyun (JeunesseHoe Ouvriere Chretienne) was one
of the leading organizations among the Christian institutions. It (1985) believes that
minjung education will be a way to create new human beings and society, working
to educate and organize young labor workers. The organization insists that labor
workers need to be aware of their social condition in which capitalism,
individualism, and selfishness are prevalent. It also stresses the importance of
action; both education and action need to go together. Through this education and
action, Catholic Nodong Chongnyun wantsHoe to create a space in which the
participants learn to work together as a member of a group with love and it believes
the participants naturally discover Jesus in the process.
Christian organizations, such as theKi-nong (Christian Farmers Association)
andKa-nong (Catholic Farmers Association), contributed to the early organization
of peasants. Chung (1985), a priest who ledKa-Nong (Catholic Farmers
Association), offers ten principal ideas to build a new society in working with
farmers from his religious perspective.
1. Work with God
2. Learn from Jesus and follow his path
3. Live in harmony with nature
4. Keep open-mind
5. Be independent
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6. Collective work
7. Worship, work, play, and study were not separable and interconnected
8. Organize based on community
9. Start from a easy task
10. Church should be open to everyone and it needs to be a common, (p. 330)
For him, the purpose of minjung education is to give farmers the experience of
God’s love in their learning and lives, and the Bible and the reality farmers faced
became the contents of the education. He stresses that farmers could learn how to
live together through education.
These religious groups played a key role in educatingminjung under the
oppressive situation in which virtually any kind of political resistance was banned
and crushed by military regimes. Churches were the only places which had the
resources to support minjung and their actions were frequently accused of being
procommunist.
The Yahak Movement in the 1960s and the 1970s
Another effort for minjung education was conducted by university students
in Yahaks. During the rapid industrialization of the 1960s under the economic
development plan by the military regime, the phrase “education is the key to
success” became a buzzword around the nation and everyone jumped into the race
for good education. However, workers in cities were left out and young university
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students and Christians openedYahaks, night schools, to help workers access
education. Mostly, churches offered classrooms toyahaks and if the teachers didn't
have a space for the school, they even set up tents. The volunteers, mostly university
students, opened schools in cities and offered various subjects. Workers and the
urban poor, yearning for educational opportunities, cameyahaks to and the purpose
of yahaks was to help the students to passKeomjunggosi, Korean G.E.D, in most
cases. The class subjects included Korean, math, and English, which were the same
in formal education.
During the 1970s, as the resistance against the regime kept growing in
various fields of Korean society as well as economic changes, the contents and aims
of yahak also began to change in proportion. First, it was for an economical reason.
The development policy of the military regime, “development first and distribution
later”, based its success on the low wages of labor workers, and the emerging labor
movement posed a serious question against the economic development plan.
Second, the teachers ofyahaks began to recognize the important role of labor
workers as a strong force for democracy and started to deal with labor issues at
yahaks. The growing resistance ofminjung against the military regime, especially
the self-sacrifice of Chun Tae II, was a wake-up call for the intellectuals, including
the teachers of yahaks, to pay attention to the labor issues of the period.
Such awakening madeyahak teachers go beyond the limit ofKeomjeongkosi
yahak, which only focused on individual development and passingKeomjeongkosi
(Korean G.E.D). The teachers and students realized the social reality in which
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students couldn't go up the social ladder even though they passed the exam. The
social inequality was not an individual problem but a social one. Thus, they had to
change the social structure which reproduced the status quo of inequality. Ayahak
student shows his personal transformation:
My only interest was to passKeomjeongkosi, but I have a different goal now. I became a different man. I used to study to obtain an educational background and personal advancement but I begin to study for a different purpose now. I want to study to do something good for those who are less fortunate than me. (Anonymous, 1985, p. 164)
In such efforts, different types ofyahaks emerged in the 1970s. The new one
was called asSaehwal yahak in which the main contents of studies were consisted
of subjects related to everyday life such as flower arrangement and brush writing.
The contents were diverse and the spectrum was wide from progressive to
conservative in Saehwal yahak (Anonymous, 1985). It tried to go beyond the limit
of Keomjeongkosi, but the aims and the contents ofSaehwal yahak were not clear
yet. Mainly,Saehwal yahak was considered as a transition period from
Keomjeongkosi yahak to Labor yahak.
Labor yahaks were developed out of efforts to overcome the limit of
Keomjeongkosi yahak in the midst of increasing the labor work force and poor
working conditions, as well as the increasing social awareness in ongoing protest
against the military regime.Labor yahak put much emphasis on labor issues and
labor law rather than the subjects for Keomjeongkosi (Korean G.E.D Test).
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Summary
The characteristics of minjung education in this period can be summarized
as: (1) religious organizations played a key role to develop the form and contents,
(2) the contents were limited in the supporting role of public education and the way
of teaching was the same as public education, mostly lecturing, and (3) critical
analysis of power relation and the role minjungof in a society had not fully
developed.
Minjung Education in the 1980s
During this period, the student movement emerged as a leader in minjungthe
movement, actively seeking political alliance with labor workers and peasants under
the influence of Marxism. The bloodshed in Kwangju made them throw away the
naive idea of liberal democracy and had them contemplate their previous actions in
order to find a new way for their future actions.
In this search, they realized the need to establish their actions on scientific
social theories. It was the conflict between the military dictatorship andminjung that
captured the central idea of student activists in the previous fights. They just fought
against the inhumane military regime, hoping to build a liberal democracy, with no
clear strategy for seizing the political power.
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Marxism and theM inium Movement
In order to learn and go beyond the limitations of the previous fights,
student activists began to study Marxism and launched an initiative to understand
Korean society from a Marxian perspective. They believed that they had to
understand the unique characteristics of the Korean society if they wanted to bring
social change. They had to know what kind of society it was and they needed to
know who could be the agents of the revolutionary social change through scientific
analysis. Marxism became a powerful tool for the analysis. From this perspective,
the previous actions of both religious groups and student groups were so naive that
those were destined to fail. Those groups didn’t have a clear idea about social
structures in Korean society.
However, student activists began to develop a different discourse with the
influx of Marxism. The student groups were divided mainly into two groups
depending on how one understands the nature of the basic conflict in Korean society.
One activist group, called the People’s Democracy (PD), tried to analyze the Korean
society based on class analysis. They believed that the Korean society became a
capitalist society in which the conflict between the ruler and the ruled should be
understood as a class struggle. From this perspective, the enemy of the struggle
became a capitalist class, and the state was regarded as an apparatus to protect the
class. Thus, their primary concern was to organize labor workers and the group
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believed that other classes would join the fight around the leadership of the labor
class. In this sense, building a labor party in the fight became crucial and inevitable.
On the other hand, the second group, National Liberation (NL), believed that
the basic conflict in Korean society was to overcome imperialism. They thought that
Korea did not fully develop into a capitalist society and became a different type of
colony controlled by imperialism. From this perspective, the oppositional forces
became a confederation of all people suffering from the exploitation of imperialism,
including small-scale capitalists and a middle class, which was identical to the
concept ofminjung. In this analysis, the United States became a key enemy to defeat
to bring social change, and the state was understood as puppet regimes of the
imperialists. Thus, building a united front against American imperialism based on
the strong alliance between labor and peasants became a critical issue of this group.
The key argument can be summarized as follows:
Today, the major task of international PTRM (proletariat revolutionary movement) is to construct allied anti-American frontiers of the most world proletariat masses, confronting against the counter-revolutionary world imperialist’s invasions. As one of the participants of world revolution and construction, the task of Korean Proletariat, based on the task of international PTRM, should be the preparation of the foundations for struggle that prevent as the basis of Korean revolution, and finishing the neocolonial Fascist ruling of the United States in Korean peninsula. It finally should accomplish National Liberation People’s Democratic Revolution, and Reunification, (p. 216, cited in Han)
In spite of their differences among student groups, Han (1995) points out the
similarities among these student groups as follows:
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1. The fundamental alternative of the movement was socialism, which accompanies also Minjungism, nationalism, and the unification of the Korean peninsula.
2. Marxist-Leninism and North Korean “Juche-Sasang” were considered as the “orthodox” theoretical foundation.
3. The accepted strategic model was a series of Soviet models, such asMinjung struggle, their progress toward guerrilla warfare, and the adaptation of Bolshevik people’s regime.
4. The subject of the counter-hegemony, in principal, should be the working class.
5. The most critical task to achieve was to build vanguard leadership in clandestine, (p. 217)
Student activists from both groups had actively engaged in social
movements to achieve their aims, turning themselves into labor workers and
peasants. The PD group, with their focus on labor workers, paid little attention to
organizing peasants, but the NL group stressed the importance of the peasants’ role
in the fight against imperialism.
With the students joining labor workers and peasants, Marxism spread into
both the labor movement and the peasant movement. The students used false names
to get jobs in factories and began to organize small groups. In those groups, they
studied with workers why they had to organize, why they had to fight against
military regimes, and how they could build a new society. The groups became a
training ground and student activists attempted to organizerevolutionary a labor
party with progressive workers identified in the group activities. Initially, the
student activists worked on organizing the groups and then developed the
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underground groups to the regional labor alliance. The final purpose was to develop
the regional labor alliance into a labor party which would lead a Korean revolution.
(Kang, 1994) Since the military regime, using its political apparatus, was watching
closely the activities of labor workers to cut the link between the students and labor
workers, the group meetings were conducted in a very clandestine way. The
conversation between an organizer of the Catholic Farmers Union (CFU) and a
peasant during the period well described the nature of the secrecy under the severe
oppression.
CFU: If you hate to sacrifice, but you need to find a method to definitely make this succeed, I have a proposal: why don’t you go back and send a few other people? I’ll give them education and make them part of the organization so that the project can succeed. But you must not disturb what I do. You must also not inform the government or the police. Remember that government institution and district heads are on Samyang’s side.
Yun: Instead why don’t you give three hundred people education and then together we can stage a hunger strike at Samyang? That should solve it. I’ll take responsibility for bringing people to you.
CFU: That is not so wise. You must try all other ways of fighting, and at the most advanced level— with a well-trained organization—you can stage an organized hunger strike. For farmers who live with physical labor— it’s most disadvantageous to have a hunger strike.
Yun: Well, then, let’s have a lecture at the Koch’ang Cathedral or somewhere in our district.
CFU: That too would push things ahead, but first we must train— send some lower people fortraining. Itwould be best if youalso got some education, but if to boot you are afraid of that, what can we do!
Yun: So, what sort of people shall I send?
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CFU: First of all, they should be bold, courageous people. Second, they should be people who are recognized in their village; and third they should be people who aren’t unintelligent, but their level of education is of no matter. (Abelmann, 1995, p. 126)
The Yahak Movement in the 1980s
In a pamphlet called “criticism againstyahak” a group of student activists
called on the student movement's ignorance on labor movement’s role and called for
student activists to work on building the labor movement. It also insisted thatyahak
should focus on political education for labor workers. With this growing awareness
over the importance of the labor movement, many student activists turned
themselves into labor workers andyahaks became a link between the student
movement and the labor movement.
For the purpose of working with labor workers, yahaks in this period were
located near factories and most of the students were labor workers, especially
women workers. The student ages ranged from 15 to 19. The teachers tried to adopt
problem-solving education and dialogue education as they learned from Freire and
Marx, but it was hard to implement what they knew. However, it was not surprising
given that the teachers were young university students with no experience in
teaching.
Additionally,yahaks were facing many difficulties which confined their
educational work such as student recruitment, teacher recruitment, securing places,
and financial problems. On top of that, the political oppression yahakson was
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escalating and severalyahak teachers were arrested on the charge of being
communists. In spite of all the difficulties,yahaks survived and its contribution on
minjung education deserved credit. yahakA teacher reflected on yahaks role: ’
History, itself, was a great teacher to minjung. They learned resistance and democracy through history. However, social apparatuses of military regimes and commercialized mass media hypnotized the consciousnessminjung. of We, university students, had to engage yahakin movement to awaken the consciousness ofminjung, to change the distorted reality ofminjung, and to recover full humanity ofminjung. Through this practice, we can identify with minjung and joined the movement for social justice. (Anonymous, 1985, p. 174)
Summary
During this revolutionary period, the student movement led the labor
movement and the peasant movement, but the role of the student movement as a
leader inminjung movement began to diminish with the rising labor power in the
labor strikes and the emerging peasant power in the peasant movement. The labor
movement and the peasant movement started to take thier own initiatives. As a
result, the place of learning had changed from the clandestine groups to labor unions,
peasant unions, and other supporting organizations.
This period can be characterized as follows: (1)minjung education was
conducted simultaneously with the organizing efforts of intellectuals inminjung the
movement against the military regimes,minjung (2) education was heavily
influenced by Marxism, and (3) it was intellectual- driven and the methods of
education did not differ from formal education, except for its contents.
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Minjung Education from the 1990s to the Present
In the 1990s, the inauguration of a civilian government with some progress
in democracy, and the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern communist
countries brought sudden changes into the democratic movement in Korea.
Suddenly, the revolutionary steam of the democratic movement vanished though
fundamental social change never happened; adult educators discovered themselves
alienated from people who were less likely to care about politics than before. This
frustration, during the transition period from military dictatorships to a civilian
government, was rampant in the history of adult education for social change.
Timothy Ireland (1996) showed the similar difficulty in the case of Brazil.
Social liberation is not just around the comer, as it had appeared to be. In Brazil the military have returned to the barracks but despite their replacement by elected governments, the drift into social apartheid and moral disintegration continues. Those who continue to orientate their educational practices by the principles of popular education now face a new and more complex conjuncture, (p. 133)
Philippine popular educators, who risked their lives to break down the
Marcos dictatorship supported by the United States and build a civilian government,
expressed the same confusion.
Life was agonizingly simple then, and that made it dangerous. You simply stirred people up, mobilized them, organize them; you simply took up arms, got tortured or killed. Someone simply took your place. That was how it was: pathetically simple. Marcos’ vulgarity madeof sure that. .. Where, finally, Marcos caved in. Then the certainty of the struggle gave way to the confusion of reality... We found ourselves facing a strange fruit, one plainly different from what we expected after two decades of toils. Marcos was down, Cory Aquino and her people were up, and we, the Left, didn’t quite know what hit us. (Garcia, 1999, p. 31)
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In search of a new vision with the reflection on the role of theminjung
movement during the 1980s, thesimin movement had developed quickly. Han
(2001) explained that theminjung movement in 1980s was a revolutionary
movement to seize a state power but the simin movement in 1990s turned to
“politics of discourse” (Han, 2001, p. 282). It sought reformative measures such as
policy development, government watchdog, and economic justice. He added that the
minjung movement created a space for thesimin movement in their fight against the
military regimes.
Chongsun-Yondai was a case in point to illustrate the characteristics of the
simin movement. It actively engaged in an election for the National Assembly to
prevent corrupt politicians from getting into the legislature. It asked for the
government to reveal the information of the legislature’s work to see how well they
represented for their constituency. It also pressured the Election Management
Committee to reveal the record of the candidates such as military duty records, tax
records, and criminal background checks. Based on the information, the group made
a list of candidates who it believed unsuitable for the office and launched a public
campaign not to vote for the politicians. According to Kim (2000), 59 candidates in
the list out of 112 failed to become candidates in their primaries, 66.3% of 86
candidates on the list failed to be elected, and15 candidates out of22 people who
were on the least preferable candidate list were defeated in the election.
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The Yahak Movement in the 1990s
Yahaks also faced a tough situation throughout the 1990s and some factors
contributed to the quagmire. First, there was improvement in the political situation
in Korean politics. In 1997, long-time opposition leader Kim Dae Jung became
president and opened a new era in Korean history. Second, Korea achieved
economic success and even became a member of the Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development (O.E.C.D). Third, many formal schools absorbed
the yahaks ’students into their system. Finally,yahak teachers' purpose for being
teachers had been changed and so did the students'.
In this changed political situation, theyahaks had to reestablish its roles and
some even claimed thatyahaks ’had done its roles and should be halted. Yet, some
yahaks are working hard to develop a new form ofyahak Nambu yahak is a good
example of a new approach which tried to establish the school as a community
learning center.
Minjung Education and Academic Research
Political oppression and the urgency of an immediate fight against the
oppression prevented educators from reflecting on the experience minjungof
education during the 1970s through the 1980s. Thus the systemic research on
minjung education had not been conducted and practical experience was left
unorganized. In an effort to developminjung education literature based onminjung
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movement practices during 1970s through 1980s,HanKuk Minjung Kyo Yook Ron
(Korean Minjung Education Theory) was published, which included various areas of
minjung education such as labor, peasants,and yahaks. The military regime banned
the sale of the book but the ban was lifted in 1987 whenminjung took center stage
as a force of democratic movement.
In the book, Lee Mi Suk (1985) explains the emergence of minjung
education based on Korean context. She argues that Korea has been suffering from
neo-colonialism after the liberation from Japan. Colonialism used direct violence
against the colony but neo-colonialism used more subtle ways to exploit colonies
such as culture, military, and economy. Of such manipulative ways by neo
colonialism, education was a key to sustain the status quo of neo-colonialism. She
claims that the United States tried to conquer Korean society culturally instead of a
direct rule by its puppet regime, making Koreans believe that American values were
the best and they should follow suit through education by Korean military regimes.
She criticizes that public education by military regimes enslaved Korea and its only
purpose was to keep the status quo for military regimes and the imperialist country.
In this situation, the lives ofminjung kept deteriorating and the need forminjung
education for their liberation was urgent. She summarizes her argument as shown in
Table 5.
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Table 5
Comparison of Public Education andM inium Education
Public Education Minjung Education
• Liberation from neo Purpose colonialism • To keep status-quo • To achieve national reunification
• To critically understand social reality from the Content • To justify ideology of view of minjung ruling groups • To fight off ideology of the ruler
• Progressive intellectuals Teacher • Teachers and conscious-raised minjung
Form • Mass education in schools • Small groups and other social institutions
Results • Domesticated, dependent, • Independent, critical, and uncritical people and progressive people
Source: Lee, M.S. (1985, p. 15).
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Her view on education, reflecting the perspective of student activists, is quite
different from the religious groups and shows the influence of social analysis. She
pointed out that (1)minjung educators did not have systemic understanding of
minjung education such as contents and methods, minjung(2) education relegated to
an end to achieve political purpose of social movement, and (3)minjung education
was mostly led by intellectuals rather thanminjung (p. 42).
Along with clandestine small study groups among labor workers, education
in labor unions also became important when labor unions sprang up with the
advance of theminjung movement. In the same book, Chang (1985) argues that
labor union education is for raising the class consciousness of the members and
helping them understand the importance of labor unions. In order to raise the
consciousness of labor workers, he claims that (1) labor workers should believe in
their knowledge obtained through their social experience, and they had to break the
myth of looking at them through the lens of the oppressor as “inferior”; (2) labor
workers should develop their own stance based on their experience to solve the
social problems they faced; and (3) labor workers should work for the common
cause instead of competing with each other to get an upper hand. Additionally,
Chang explains how to conduct various types of education for labor union members
such as lectures, labor schools, study circles, and union newspapers.
He also stresses the importance of continuing education of the members so
that they can develop their conviction in labor movement. As a starting point for
such education, Chang insists, (1) the members had to reflect on their unions’
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decisions: why and how the decisions were made, (2) the education’s contents
should be the real practical problems in their situations, (3) union officers should
leam how to analyze their situation, (4) union meetings were the good place of
learning: The meetings should be well prepared and everyone have their voice in the
meetings, (5) they should study the good example of other unions and leam from the
experience, and (6) most importantly, unions had to listen to the members’ voices,
leam from their experience, and create a unified opinion out of democratic
discussion and research on the related issues.
Huh Byong Sup (1985), a pastor and educator working with the urban poor,
asserts that minjung education was a dialectical process in whichminjung and the
intellectuals leam together. The intellectuals leam fromminjung. He believes that
knowledge that does not relate tominjung’s reality is meaningless, insisting that
knowledge should come fromminjung’s lives. For the purpose, the intellectuals
should dig intominjung’s life to share the knowledge and leam from it. The live of
minjung became the textbook of their learning which Huh believed to be the key
premise for minjung education. Finally, he argues that the intellectuals who learned
new knowledge fromminjung had to prove the knowledge byminjung again
through dialogue with minjung.
As democracy expanded and civilian government came into office, little
literature on the minjung movement during the revolutionary period came forward
from young scholars. The studies fell into two groups depending on their focus. One
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group focused onminjung education in theminjung movement during the early
period while the other studiedsimin education in thesimin movement.
Chung Yon Sun (1998) examined labor education in the 1970s, specifically
the educational programs of the Christian Academy. Kim Min Ho (1997) did a
qualitative study on a labor college, examining the contents and learning process of
the college based on interviews with the students and the teachers of the college.
Uhm Ki Hyung (1996) explored the characteristics of educational programs of
movement organizations in Korea. Hong studied the influence of Paulo Freire on
Korean minjung education. All these studies pointed out the same problem of
minjung education during the period. The problem was that there was not much
difference betweenminjung education and public education in terms of teaching
methods. It was banking education with the revolutionary contents, and a Philippine
popular educator jokingly called it “revolutionary banking education” (Garcia,
1999).
For the second group, Yang Hee Jun (2002) studied the educational work of
a civil organization which representedsimin movements. In the study, he tried to
compare the learning process and methods in the organization to the earlierminjung
education. Interestingly, he points out that educationsimin in movements was still
intellectual-driven and heavily dependent on didactic methods. Kim Jin Hee (2003)
also studied theHwan Gyong Undong Yon Hap(Environment Movement Alliance)
to reveal the development of education in the organization and to identify the key
issues in the process.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The young scholars brought back the learning process and learning
dimension in social movements in Korean history to the academia, but the literature
is still lacking. It is very hard to find adult education programs working on the social
dimension of adult education. As North American adult education literature
excludes the historical adult learning processes in social movements, so does the
Korean adult education literature.
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THE INTERPRETATION OF THE FINDINGS
Despite this apparent consensus among academics and politicians, the peasantry refuses to disappear, or to play a marginal role. Despite the decline in the relative percentage of rural inhabitants, the peasantry over the past 20 years has re-emerged as an historical actor, playing a central role in changing regimes, determining national agendas, leading struggles against international trade agreements (ALCA or Free Trade Area of the Americas) as well as establishing regional and local bases of power. James Petras
Three major themes emerged from the data: (1) learning from peasants, (2)
learning with peasants, and (3) learning in social actions. The first theme showed
the learning process of the activists in which they were experiencing the reality,
rebuilding their idea for social change based on the experience. It also revealed their
learning process of farming as novices in collective work. The second theme
revealed how the activists developed their own pedagogies while they were working
with the peasants. The last theme unfolded what the activists learned in their actions
for social justice in their communities.
Learning from Peasants: The Development of Vision
The activists came to their communities with their initial vision of social
change. As student activists, they studied Marxism in the universities and their
initial vision was to organize peasants, to build alliance with labor workers and
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student activists, and to prepare for armed struggles with the military regimes. The
student activists had studied the Russian revolution and the Chinese revolution as
good examples for a future revolution in Korea. Their vision came from a theory,
and they came to their community to practice the theory. However, they realized the
big gap between their theoretical vision and the not-so-revolutionary reality in face
of the reality in their communities.
The situation was totally different from what they expected and they went
through “disorienting dilemma” and “perspective transformation” while they were
learning from peasants in their communities (Mezirow, 1991). Four sub themes
emerged and are discussed in this part: (1) finding and settling down in the
communities, (2) learning reality: hard manual labor and economical hardship, (3)
experiential learning in collective work, and (4) learning collective culture. The first
theme showed how the activists found their communities and how they settled down
in their communities. The second theme explored the barriers they faced in their
realities, and the third theme examined their experiential learning process in
collective work with the peasants. The last one unfolded the activists’ learning of
collective culture in their communities from which the activists were constructing
an alternative way of life, which was quite different from a “dog-eat-dog” mentality
of capitalism.
Through this learning process, the activists began to see the gap between
their initial vision which had been formed through their student activism. They also
got to understand the complex reality of the peasants, developing new vision based
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on the situation and reflecting on their actions. The learning process seemed
instructive to develop a new concept of learning. Gonczi (2004) criticizes the old
notion of learning that “learning is concerned with the process of individual minds
being provided with ideas and that these ideas are the basis of individual
competence” (p. 19). Instead, he argues that
The old learning paradigm needs to be replaced by a new one that links learners to the environment in which learning takes place. Such a learning concept takes account of the affective, moral, physical as well as the cognitive aspects of individuals, and insists that real learning takes place only in and through action, (p. 19)
The learning process of the activists well supported his argument.
Finding and Settling Down in the Communities
When student activists became seniors in universities, they chose their path
for future actions in movements for social transformation. Priority was given to the
labor class, peasants, and university students which they believed was the key force
of the Korean revolution. When they made their choices for their future, they
usually joined groups with other student activists who expressed the same intention.
The groups were called “Tusin” meeting which in Korean meant that they would
throw themselves into the sea of the oppressed. In these groups, they began to
prepare themselves for their future work. For example, the participants of this study
studied the history of the peasant movement, analysis of the peasant economy and
politics, and different methods of the peasant organizing in their groups. In addition,
they learned how to use farming tools for their future use.
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All six participants had developed their interest in the peasant movement
while they engaged in fighting against military regimes. They participated in
Nonghwals and other peasants’ struggles many times. All participants of the study
had this kind of group to help their transition period from student activists to peasant
activists. In the groups, they discussed where to go based on the current
development of the peasant movement and made their own personal decisions. For
them, the groups were the places of moral support as well as learning places.
Six participants actually consisted of three couples: Kiho and Sunhee,
Kwangsik and Sora, and Myongho and Younghee. They knew that they needed
partners to share their concerns on the rough roads ahead, given that their decision
to engage in a peasant movement was a lifetime commitment. Thus, they went to
their communities as a couple rather than going alone.
Kiho, 47, and Sunhee, 39, had three sons. They met while they were
preparing for the transfer from students to peasants. He came to his community
ahead of his wife in 1991 and Sunhee came to the community a year later. The
community didn’t have a peasant local when they came. Kiho explained
passionately how he chose his community.
I chose the community because nobody wanted to go there. At the time, many Korean Peasant League locals had been organized around the nation but the region did not have one. To put it simply, the region was very inactive in the peasant movement and that was the exact reasonI chose the region. After the decision, I began to study about the region and searched for persons who had interest in the peasant movement. Later, I found a peasant who was a member of a religious peasant group and I was introduced to him. At the time, I was full of passion and I was determined to bring changes to
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the region. Since I met him, I had visited the community several times before moving in.
He kept going on his initial settlement,
I was 32 when I moved into the community. It was April 4, 1991. Actually, I planned to arrive on April 3 in the memory of the AprilJeju 3 uprising but I had a personal problem so that I came to the peasant’s house I was introduced to on the next day. He was about 42 and he lived alone so I lived with him. He introduced me to the community and I started working with the peasants in the community.
Sunhee came to the community a few months later. She met her husband while she
was on the wanted list of the military regime because of her active engagement in
the student movement. She said,
Before I came here, I already knew many peasants in the community since Kiho had already moved in. In 1991,1 was still in a university but I already finished all the required courses except commencement so I came here and later went back to Seoul to attend the ceremony.
Kwangsik is 42 years old and he came to the community while he was
supporting the peasants’ struggle of the community as a university student. When he
was asked why he chose the peasant movement, he recalled,
When I participated inNonghwals, I was assigned to take care of the kids in the community. While I was playing with the kids, I noticed that three-or- four-year old kids were babysitting one-year-old baby and the kids didn’t have enough food to eat. I was so saddened by the reality. I felt that I was privileged as a university student and as a privileged person, I believed that I had an obligation to help the less fortunate. I think that was the beginning of my interest in the peasant movement. Later, when I joined the peasants’ struggle to take back their land, I decided that I was going to devote my life to helping peasants in need.
Kwangsik remembered that he never thought he was going to live in the community
though he planned to engage in the peasant movement after his graduation. He said,
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It was May 15, 1988. The peasants in the community were planning a big rally and many university students came to support the rally. On the day of the rally, an unprecedented number of police was dispatched to the venue and they tried to disperse the participants, which led to a big crash between the peasants and the police. Many people were injured because of violent attacks by the police but the peasants and students fought back. As a result, the regional police department chair promised to make an apology for the unnecessary violence of the police and he also gave his word to compensate for the damages. That night, student activists held a meeting to discuss what to do next and decided that someone should stay here to make sure the police chair stuck to his promise. This one happened to be me.
He has lived in the community since then even though he still had to attend
the university.
Sora was 40 years old and she went to a different university from her
husband but they met through the peasants’ struggle. When she was in a sophomore,
university students were organizing rallies against a military regime and she joined
the rallies. At a rally, she was arrested and her alarmed parents forced her to
withdraw from the school temporarily. However, she continued to come to the
school to meet friends and to get more information about the student movement. A
year later, she came back to the school and read about the peasants’ struggle in the
school newspaper. She recalled,
I was a member of a student group which studied agriculture and peasant issues. So when I read about the peasant struggle, I thought that I needed to help them. I went to a university where the peasants had been stayed with other friends. At the time, my husband, as a member of agriculture study group, was a student leader supporting the peasants. While engaging in the struggle, I thought that I should live a life to side with the oppressed vaguely.
At the rallies, Kwangsik and Sora got to know each other and she came to the
community in 1991.
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Myongho was 40 years old and Yonghee was 39. They found their
community through their participations inNonghwals. Myongho and Yonghee were
both in charge of organizingNonghwasl in their universities and they attended the
regional meetings of university representatives to organizeNonghwasl. They got to
know each other at the meetings.
Myongho remembered,
I came here August in 1991 and I began my farming in 1992. This community was the place where I came forNonghwal in 1989. While working with the peasants inNonghwal, I had a chance to experience peasants’ lives and I also experienced how much the military regime wanted to stop students from working with the peasants. Since then, I kept contacts with the peasants in the region and told them that I wanted to work with them after I graduated from a university. I also had ‘tusin” meetings but I chose my community. When I came to this community, the peasants already had their local. I started my work as a clerk in the local union. While working as a clerk, I learned about the region and had a chance to look around to find a village where I could live and to figure out what kinds of crops I wanted to raise. A year later, I went to a town I chose and began my farming. Peasant activists helped me to settle down in the town.
Yonghee also took part in Nonghwals very actively throughout her university life.
She remembered,
I participated inNonghwals when I was a sophomore. While working in the fields, I vaguely thought about a being peasant and talked to my friends that I wanted to engage in the peasant movement. I didn’t have a clear idea about the peasant movement but the thought always remained in my mind since then. I still remembered the day I was walking down the road after hard work in the fields with the peasants and friends. My husband came to the community ahead of me and I joined him later.
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Learning Reality: Hard Manual Labor and Economical Survival
In their communities, the student activists-tumed-peasant activists faced
many problems. They had to find a place to live, they had to find land to work, and
they had to make money to make a living in the communities where many peasants
had suspicions of them. They had to leam how to survive in the reality where the
peasants were living. The contents they studied for their revolutionary practice in
their communities didn’t help them much and even simply surviving in the situation
seemed tough. Problems were everywhere of which the burden of labor and the
pressure of economic survival caught them off guard.
Even though they participated inNonghwals and had chances to work in
fields, it was far from the real life of the peasants. The intensity of daily work was
hard to endure for the university graduates. Kiho explained the initial burden of hard
labor.
When I came to this community, I really worked hard, meeting lots of peasants after work. Sometimes I was overwhelmed by the burden and felt like I couldn’t make it. Especially during the busy season such as transplanting season and harvest season, the level of hard labor was unbearable.
I was supposed to work with a peasant who gave me a place to live but he didn’t work. I had to work all by myself. At night, he came home and asked me how much work I finished. Then he scolded me how come a young boy like me made such a little progress in the work. One day I was working hard with the peasants and I was exhausted. Then came news that an elder in the town passed away so that all peasants left for the funeral except me. I was left alone in a wide field with a bull. How did I know how to use a bull to till soils? But I had to figure it out.
Sora remembered her suffering from hard labor,
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I didn’t know how to drive when I came here so that moving around towns was hard for me, especially in the countryside because there was little public transportation. My community didn’t have a woman peasant organization then and I began to organize one. Working on the organizing, I also tried to transform myself into a real peasant. You know, it was easy to be a peasant in my mind but it was difficult in reality, especially given the fact that I didn’t have much experience in hard labor. So the life was hard for me. Later, my body was partially paralyzed after I gave birth to my second baby. I think it was caused by hard labor. When I delivered my second baby, it was the busiest season of the year and I didn’t have time to rest after childbirth.
She kept on telling her husband’s story with a smile.
Before I came here, we’re sending letters back and forth. Whenever I read my husband’s letters, I felt really sorry for him. In a letter, he was telling about his experience as a combine assistant. He said he was so busy coping with a combine driver. Think about it. The driver’s job was not difficult so he kept working without any breaks but for him carrying heavy rice bags in fields was really hard. At lunch time, my husband got really hungry but the driver didn’t eat much and got back to work so quickly that he didn’t have enough time to eat.
On top of the hard labor, the activists expressed their frustration about their
financial survival and their incapability. Sora recalled,
My husband and I came to this community because we were involved in the peasants’ struggle. The peasants in the town knew us well through the struggle but we moved into an adjacent town where the atmosphere was quite different. When we were looking for a house, a peasant who became a friend of my husband through the struggle told my husband that his father had a house in the town we moved and we could buy it. We were delighted and managed to make money to buy the house, but his father refused to sell the house to us. He sold it to a different person, so we had to look around again and found a house where we live now. The house was a really old house in a bad shape.It seemed like the house wasabout to crumble. Anyway, we bought the house with all the money we had. Later when we invited our parents to our home, they were so saddened by the condition of the house.
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Kiho and Sunhee had a similar experience in finding their house in their community.
Kiho recalled,
A peasant friend who I got to know here offered me a house, telling me that I could use the house until he died. So I gladly accepted his offer. But one day he came up and said he needed to sell the house. I think he started a new business and he was in need of cash. At the time, I was frustrated. There was nowhere to go and I didn’t have the money to buy a house. I was so sad. Later, I was in the restroom and when I was about to get out of it, I heard my wife was singing outside with a baby in her arms. The song title was ‘ttang’ and the lyric went like this: how happy we will be if we had ‘ttang’ (land). I was so shameful that I couldn’t get out.
Younghee explained that the economic survival was so hard that it caused some
student activists to give up their original purposes of social change.
Economic survival is so hard that some student activists began to go to work to make money instead of farming. Especially, women activists began to work while their husbands kept working in their communities. This became a big concern .We had hard time in scheduling women peasants’ meetings because many of them worked in different places to feed their families. In many cases, the activists’ marriages came to end due to financial difficulties. It was so sad to watch their marriages go awry.
Myongho also described the economical hardship in his community.
Peasants in my community couldn’t make enough money for their families and they usually worked on construction sites to make some extra money. So did I. If there was a national project by the government, such as building power transmission towers, I went there to work. I also worked at gas stations to make ends meet.
Sora recalled the early days when she just moved in:
We tried to rent some land but it was difficult for outsiders like us to rent land. The only land left for us was the land no one wanted to work in. It was a piece of land where peasants couldn’t use a machine to harvest or land which went underwater several times a year. In such situations, we couldn’t make enough money to live so that my husband had to work on construction sites and for other peasants.
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101
As university students, they didn’t have such burdens but they had to leam
how to survive in the reality where peasants managed to live to transform
themselves into the peasants. Their experience in reality also made them aware of
their incapability of managing financial situations. Back in the universities, they
were required to devote everything they had to fight the military regimes, and they
were not accustomed to the idea of making money which most university students
began to have for their personal futures.
Sora pointed out that the activists didn’t have much time to think about how
to a make living. Thus they lacked the ability to survive in this society, specifically
in a capitalistic society.
I think the activists lacked a sense of reality and economic management. For example, we organized a peasant group and put together money to buy agricultural machines. We tried to manage the machines, but we failed due to the lack of management and maintenance skills. As a result, the group went bankrupt and I was indebted pal bak man won ($8,000).
To put it simply, I think including me thathakchul didn’t know how to calculate profit and loss. The only thing they knew was not to spend much. Look around. Manyhakehuls have three kids. Whether men or women, hakchuls lacked a sense of reality. They didn’t know how to survive in the reality of capitalism. Common people began to think about how to make money to live in their 20s or 30s buthakchuls didn’t think about the issue. Suddenly, they began to realize the importance of the issue in their 40s. They trivialized the issues when they were young, but they came to realize that it was a big issue to think about to survive in this society.
Younghee remembered a similar case in her community.
Local members put together money and made a seed company. Some people invested a lot of money into the company but the company went bankrupt before long. As a result, the relationship among the peasants went sour and the local chair took the responsibility for most of the debt to prevent the local from breaking up.
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Myongho expressed the same concern,
I think everyone is feeling the heat. We need to find a way to survive in the current economic system and we need to make enough money to continue to work on social changes. We didn’t pay attention to the economical problem. Some might but we didn’t think the issue through as a group. I think it is time to think and figure out how to survive as a group. Out of this concern, we are working to build a cooperative by ourselves.
Younghee added:
Every peasant in the nation is facing bankruptcy and they are struggling to make ends meet. I think we have to find a solution for the problem together. I’m not sure how we can make it yet, but one thing I’m sure is that it won’t be an individual way of surviving.
She stressed that it was important to show a viable economical vision for peasants as
well as a political vision if the local wanted to expand its role,
In my community, I was the first one to try to grow mushrooms and I was the first one to try big greenhouses. I’m always the first one who tries something new. But I failed to make profits from what I did. My neighbors liked me but they couldn’t follow what I did in terms of farming. In order to work with the peasants, I think we, the activists, should also develop a profitable model of work which other peasants could leam from. With no such ability, we will have a hard time persuading them into the peasant movement.
The experience of the activists in reality supported the argument of Allman and
Wallis. They (1995) stress:
However, the radical educator also must be realistic. It is crucial that we do not misunderstand the relation between vision/strategy and the more short term, tactical processes we need to employ within the prevailing social relations of oppression. Far too frequently, radical educators have disappointed themselves and invited the ridicule of others because we have lacked, or at least not stressed, a degree of realism, (p. 19)
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In summary, the participants learned the complicated nature of reality
through these physical and economic hardships. When they decided to be peasants,
they only had an abstract idea of the peasants and they believed that the peasants
would rise up and lead a revolution when they learned the political truth. It seemed
so simple but it was much more complicated in reality and they began to understand
the complexity through their lives.
The novice peasants also learned the importance of financial independence
in their political work. As university students, they were free from the burden of
feeding their families and they spent most of their time on political organizing.
Financial independence and political work were separate for them but as peasants,
they had to make a living while they were working so that they began to see the
interconnection between financial independence and political work.
Experiential Learning in Collective Work
The activists energetically participated inNonghwals to support the peasant
movement when they were in the universities as a way to strengthen the political
alliance between the students and the peasants. Through participation, they had
chances to experience rural life and leam about basic farming work. Yet, they were
nothing but novices when they came to their communities to organize the peasants
in terms of farming skills. In this situation, they had to leam fast to catch up with
other peasants but their lack of knowledge in farming helped them in a way that
made them aware of their ignorance while acknowledging the peasants’ cultural
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knowledge in their work. The contents of their learning were directly linked to their
realities which made them leam faster than probably they could learn at schools.
Keaton and Tate capture the power of experiential learning.
The learner is directly in touch with the realities being studied.... It involves direct encounter with the phenomenon being studied rather than merely thinking about the encounter or only considering the possibility of doing something with it. (as cited in Kolb, 1984, p. 2)
Yonghee remembered how hard it was at first to leam farming skills.
It was so difficult to make ridges in rice paddies and I had no idea how to do it. So I had to leam it from other peasants. My neighbors explained to me how to make them but it took several years for me to make the ridges as well as other peasants. They made the ridges with ease and the ridges looked nice.
In another case when you work in a rice field, you have to make it flat so that water could reach everywhere in the field but it was difficult to leam it. I tried many times, making lots of mistakes. Now I’ve got the hang of it. In the beginning, I couldn’t make the rice field flat so that the water couldn’t reach some parts of the field. As a result, many weeds sprang up in my rice paddies. Whenever I had problems, I learned from other peasants how to solve the problem and I also carefully watched the ways other peasants worked.
In the communities, peasants still had the culture of collective work, called
“Pumasr in Korean. It was a way of helping and working together in rural
communities. When someone needed extra hands for his work, peasants in the
community went there to help. They shared their labor power to finish their work.
The student activists learned the farming skills through this collective work in their
communities.
Kwangsik explained how he learned farming skills.
Farming consisted of several processes which required a different level of skills. I started my work from the easiest one and went through the different
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levels of work. After a year, I learned all the processes and the burden of work was relieved. Peasants kept changing their way of working depending on their situations and I began to develop my own way. Additionally, I read some agriculture books to improve my farming.
He kept on with his story:
When I learned farming from peasants, I almost killed a peasant in one case. One day, a peasant hired me. It was my first time I was hired to work in other peasants’ fields and I went to the rice field with him and his brother. When we got the field, he suddenly recognized he forgot to bring something and asked me to pick it up at his house with his brother. He assumed I knew how to drive a cultivator and I couldn’t tell him the truth that I didn’t know how to drive it. So I sat in the driver’s seat helplessly, trying to figure out what to do while his brother sat in the back. Based on the mere memory of my observation, I started the cultivator. It went smoothly until I reached at a comer. When I made a turn at the comer on a narrow road between rice fields, a rear wheel fell into a field and I lost control of the vehicle. I jumped out of my seat but his brother fell into the field and the cultivator fell onto him. Luckily, he was not injured but it was a close call. I never had such an accident since then.
Myongho also learned farming through collective work in his community.
I didn’t have much experience in farming. I just followed what other peasants were doing. When I went out forpumasi, I did the simplest job at first such as holding lines or carrying seedbeds. Through this collective work, I gradually learned about farming. But the way of farming kept changing. At first, I saw many peasants useJigye (old carrier made of wood) to carry the rice seedbed in the transplant season but not any more.
Sunhee remembered how she learned farming.
I learned through working together with other peasants. My husband also taught me how to do it. I had experience inNonghwals so that the work didn’t seem strange to me.
In this way, the activists learned farming skills through their experience and the
learning continued to develop. At this point, Dewey’s point for the continuity of
experiential learning is worth reminding.
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The principle of continuity of experience means that every experience both takes up something those which have gone before and modifies in some way the quality of those which come after.... As an individual passes from one situation to another, his world, his environment, expands or contracts. He does not find himself living in another world but in a different part or aspect of one and the same world. What he had learned in the way of knowledge and skill in one situation becomes an instrument of understanding and dealing effectively with the situations which follow. The process goes on as long as life and learning continue, (as cited in Kolb p. 27)
Learning Collective Culture
The peasant communities still had a communal life style, which has been
weakened with the rapid industrialization in Korea. The activists loved the culture
and saw the possible seed of an alternative lifestyle in the culture.
Sunhee remembered how much she loved the lifestyle of peasants.
I liked the way peasant lives. When they had something to do for the community, they rushed to do it even though they were in the middle of doing something else. WhenI looked at the way they worked together,I felt like this was the way we were supposed to live. This is human nature.I loved their affectionate and collective lives.I thought we had to keep the caring lifestyle. WhenI came here at first, they came to help me to fix my house and they worked for me in my field whenI gave birth to my baby. Later, they took care of my baby whileI was working. At the time, it was hard to engage in the peasant movement in public due to political oppression. So when they knewI was here, they were cautious but I knew that they liked me in their hearts.
Myongho also recalled how peasants in his community used to live:
Peasants in my community used to prepare food together, and go fishing in a river together. Itwas fun. My wife andI played drums and a small gong to cheer them up. They didn’t use drums and gongs before and we were sort of adding a new thing to the party. The peasants enjoyed it. Some peasants reported what we were doing to the police but most of them were sympathetic to us. They didn’t understand why young university graduates voluntarily came to their community, though.
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Yonghee still vividly remembered the warm relationship among women peasants.
When I came here, I was the youngest among the women and they were really nice to me. About 10 women used to get together and the age range was wide, from the 20s to the 60s. The 40s were regarded as the young and most of them were 50 and 60. That’s the reality of an aging population in a peasant community. We took turns to hold meetings in which we shared food and had fun together. And we mandid won gye. The rule was that everyone chipped inMan Won each month, wrote down our name on papers, and decided the order of winners. We also saved money together. Banks were giving a special interest rate to peasants who owned less than 1.3 ha and I was eligible for the rate. So we opened an account under my name.
She also remembered that her neighbor told her that policemen came to investigate
We lived in a mountain at first in the community and local police was suspicious of me. My husband had been arrested when he was in a university so the police could recognize who he was but they didn’t have any record of me. They tried to figure out who I was and began their investigation. I once used my sister’s home as my mailing address and the police found out the address. They kept coming to my sister’s house and asked about me but my sister refused to answer. The police told my sister that they got an anonymous report about my suspicious acts. For a while, peasants in the community reported what we were doing to the local police. I learned about their reports because some of them told me about the police inquiry.
Sunhee explained the unique situation of peasants.
Peasants were different from labor workers in a way that peasants shared everything. Labor workers only shared a working place but the peasants shared their happiness, their sorrows, and their work in their communities. The most important thing among the sharing was that peasants used to work together. But with the deteriorating situation in rural areas, the way of life in peasant communities was changing. Many peasants couldn’t make ends meet with their farming and theyhad to findsecond orthird jobs to survive. To make matter worse, the government policy was in favor of big farmers at the expense of small and family peasants under the name of increasing competitiveness in the global market.
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Sora also remembered how the elders in her community showed concern about their
future at first.
The elders in my community really cared about us. They told us that they really appreciated our help but encouraged us to think twice about our decision to live in the community. They thought that it was too much sacrifice for us as young university graduates.
Learning with Peasants: The Development of Pedagogy
In their communities, the student activists-tumed-peasant activists learned
many things, both from their own encounters with the reality and from the peasants
in their communities. One of the key lessons was that they couldn’t impose their
political ideas on the peasants. Of course, they knew that they couldn’t do that
before they came to their communities but to knew something is one thing, to
practice it is a different issue. But the activists began to understand it more clearly
than ever before through their experience and practices in their communities.
Three types of pedagogy emerged as key components in their learning
process: pedagogy of commitment, pedagogy of building relationship, and the
pedagogy of dialogue. Those pedagogies were interwoven through the lives of the
activists and helped them to grow in dialogue with the peasants.
Pedagogy of Commitment
Pedagogy has been considered as a way of instruction or teaching. Naturally,
the focus is on teachers’ ability to transfer their knowledge to students. Against this
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notion, Freire espoused the pedagogy of the oppressed, criticizing the hierarchical
relationship between teachers and students that is the reflection of social inequality.
It presumed students’ inferiority and relegated them to the objects of teaching as a
vessel to “fill in.” Freire called it “banking education.”
In banking education, Freire (2000) points out:
(a) the teacher teaches and the students are taught;
(b) the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;
(c) the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;
(d) the teacher talks and the students listen—meekly;
(e) the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;
(f) the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply;
(g) the teacher acts and the student have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher;
(h) the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it;
(i) the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students;
(j) the teacher is the subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects, (p. 73)
Banking education prohibited students from developing their learning ability and
only became a tool to reproduce the hierarchical relationshipin a society in favor of
the oppressor. Freire rejected this notion of education, promoting the pedagogy of
the oppressed.
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Unlike the pedagogy of banking education, the pedagogy of the oppressed
claimed that the oppressed had the capability to create knowledge and the role of
educators became to enter into dialogues with the oppressed. Through the dialogues,
both the educators and the students learned to become agents for social change,
which made education as “the practice of freedom” instead of preaching.
Horton (1990), in the same regard, stresses that the oppressed had power to
bring personal change as well as social change.
Education is what happens to the other person, not what comes out of the mouth of the educator. You have to posit trust in the learner in spite of the fact that the people you’re dealing with may, on the surface, seem to merit that trust. If you believe in democracy, which I do, you have to believe that people have the capacity within themselves to develop the ability to govern themselves, (p. 131)
Thus, the role of educator became to help people realize their potential.
People have a potential for growth; it’s inside, it’s in the seeds. This kind of potential cannot guarantee a particular outcome, but it’s what you build on. What people need are experiences in democracy, in making democratic decisions that affect their lives and communities. (Horton, 1990, p. 133)
Pedagogy, expressed by both Freire and Horton, goes beyond personal change and
aims at social change discovering the power of change in the oppressed. The
revolutionary pedagogy calls for educators to take a position, to make an ethical
decision and to challenge unequal power structures. Phyllis Cunningham (1993)
well describes the essence of the revolutionary pedagogy in different terms.
I define critical pedagogy as the educational action which develops the ability of a group to critically reflect on their environment and to develop strategies to bring about democratic social change in that environment. Education is not about promoting the existing hegemony; education is about developing counter-hegemonic struggle. Education is not simply attaining
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knowledge; education is about the politics of knowledge. Education is not about the preservation of status and elitism; education is about democratization of power relationships, (p. 8)
The activists clearly took the same position and came to their communities,
believing in the potential power of the peasants. Yet, their pedagogy needed to be
tested out in reality.
In their communities, the student activists faced harsh reality. On the other
hand, it was a learning process to test their pedagogy. Working hard to cope with
their seasonal work in farming as novice peasants, they also had to work hard to
begin what they initially intended to do: organizing.
To explore their learning process of developing their pedagogy, it would be
appropriate to examine their initial concept of organizing and pedagogy. They
became peasants because they believed that peasants would be a key force to bring
about revolutionary social change in Korean society.
When they were in the universities, the activists tried to articulate how to
bring fundamental social change to Korea and who were going to be the main actors
for the social action. Marxism was greatly helpful to understand how a capitalist
system works but they didn’t stop there. They believed that a Korean revolution
would be different from the ones in the developed countries. They agreed that the
labor class must be organized to bring about the change but that was not enough in
the Korean situation. In search of the clear understanding of the Korean social
structure, Korean developed the concept of“minjung.”
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Minjung is a class alliance and represented the oppressed as a whole, which
included the labor class, peasants, urban poor, students, and even businessmen who
were willing to join the oppressed, of which the labor class and peasants were
regarded as key forces. Thus, organizingminjung was the first step for social change
and the activists wanted to be a seed of fire to bring fundamental change to their
communities. In a nutshell, their action plan was to find a community, organize the
community, build a political organization, and engage in political fighting to seize a
state power with the labor class. Their aim was to build a society where justice and
equality prevailed.
The activists developed their understanding of how to work withminjung
through their organizing experience in the universities and two concepts emerged as
a way to define their pedagogy:Sundo “ Tuzang” and Daejung“ TuzangThe
former concept got the idea from the Leninist vanguard party and it believed that
students as the vanguard of theminjung movement had to initiate symbolic fights so
that other groups could follow their lead. For example, student activists armed with
Molotov cocktails often attacked police departments or the ruling party offices to
show their willingness to fight against the oppression of military regimes.Daejung
Tuzang came out of the reflection onSundo Tuzang as well as their practices on
student organizing and building alliances with the labor workers and peasants. They
learned that, as Freire pointed out, the oppressed should be the subject of their
learning and fight for their emancipation. They couldn’t fightminjung for and they
had to learn to fight withminjung by organizingDaejung Tuzang.
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From the perspective of Daejung Tuzang, how minjung understood a
situation became more important than how the activists analyzed the situation. With
this concept, student activists began to define their roles in a different way. Instead
of initiating social actions directly, the activists were required to work through
minjung and the ability to work with them in their settings well was considered a
requirement for the activists, which they called it Daejungsong“ .” In order to
achieve “ Daejungsongthe activists were required to learn how the oppressed talk
and live in reality as well as respect for the oppressed.Kangchol Seosin, written by
a leader of student activists during the time called on student activists to practice the
following:
1. Believe in the revolutionary role ofminjung and work hard to raise consciousness ofminjung
2. Use familiar ways and methods in organizingminjung and become a good role model in daily lives,
3. Settle down whereminjung lives and become a part of the community,
4. Find potential leaders and work with them, (as cited in Kang, 1983, p. 314)
With this pedagogy, they jumped into the reality of peasants and began their
work. Since then, they have worked in their communities over 15 years. During this
period, they have worked hard to organize peasants. The process was full of failures
as well as success. One common thread in their past learning process in organizing
their work was the pedagogy of commitment.
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From the outset, it was commitment that made them initially commit class
suicide for social justice and the peasant movement. It was their commitment that
made them sustain their work in the face of physical and psychological burn-outs. It
was their commitment that gave them a direction for the future in a reality where
disorientation and confusion about the role of intellectuals were rampant. But
commitment won’t shape up overnight; rather it has been strengthened gradually
through daily work. The activists’ organizing process eloquently revealed the power
of the pedagogy of commitment in search for a revolutionary social change within a
Korean context. The working context of the participants was different, but the role
of the pedagogy of commitment was palpable in organizing their work as a common
thread.
Kwangsik and Sora came to their community to support the peasants’
struggle in the community and the community didn’t have a local peasant union. As
a result, the peasants in the community knew why they had come and Kwansik and
Sora began their organizing immediately. First, Kwansik and Sora identified some
peasants who had an interest in working for social change and madeGun a local
with them. Kwangsik explained how he started his work in his community.
I tried to find peasants who had an interest in working for social change and I contacted them. There were some people who had worked inKi Nong (Christian Peasant Union) andKa Nong (Catholic Peasant Union) and I talked with them. One of the influential peasants in the community was the regional chapter chair ofPyongmin party which was the opposition party at the time. Later, we had a preparation meeting to launch the local on Nov 16 in 1988.
After having the meeting to organize the city local, they kept working hard to
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expand membership. They visited several towns in the communities and found
peasants to join the local. Kwangsik remembered,
I worked hard to expand the local. First I had to find the peasants who had potential to join the local. If I identified potential members, I met them in person and talked them into joining the local. But it was hard to decide whom I had to meet so that I talked with my wife. Usually, I asked peasants who I had known to introduce me to a new peasant who I wanted to contact. Normally, I got to know them through working together in a field and then I met them in person.
Kwangsik and Sora had to walk around the towns to meet the peasants and their
organizing kept on whether it rained or shined. Sora remembered a cold winter day.
I still remember the night when we got together around fires after meeting peasants. I think we had a kind of organizing drive at the time. Several peasants including me were on their way back home after a meeting. It was so cold that we made a fire in a field to warm us up.
While they were working on organizing the locals, they also had to take care of their
farming work. Sora remembered,
I worked on organizing wives in my communities. Basically, peasants in my community depended on rice to make living and I don’t have time to try other crops. If I calculate how I assigned my time in the beginning of my work in my community, I spent 70% of my time on organizing a peasant union and the rest on farming. Even though I devoted most of my time to organizing, it didn’t mean I shrugged off my responsibility as a peasant. I worked hard in my rice fields, and I made a yield as much as other peasants. You know, some hakchuls often were criticized due to their inability to handle their farming in peasant community and I don’t want to be a part of such activists. My husband and I worked hard to manage the crop, even though we were so busy organizing. As a result, the elders in my community began to give good remarks on our work as peasants. In my case, the elders knew I came from a city and had no experience in farming. So when they saw me working hard on a hot summer day, they were surprised and gave me a credit for that.
After launching theGun local, the activists began to work on organizingMyon
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locals. In their work, Sora and Kwangsik tried to identify “potential leaders” in the
Myons at first and then worked hard to support them to acquire their leadership.
Kwangsik remembered the process, explaining the difficulty of the process.
In 1989,1 organized Nonghwala with the universities near my community. The contents of theNonghwal were to raise political consciousness against a military regime and against opening an agriculture market. Look at this (pointing at his personal diary). I had a town meeting at Noyang at 9:00 p.m and we discussed about political situation. Since we already ‘Gunhad local’, we were working on organizing‘'Myon locals’. Jeongho and Minho, those were the peasants I met at the beginning of my organizing drive. The peasants were like a nucleus. I met them through Nonghwals and they introduced me to other peasants. Some peasants came to me to join the local. Whenever I met those peasants, I talked with my wife how to help them become local leaders so that they could begin organizing by themselves. It was a hard job. For example, I met a peasant and I saw potential in him as a leader. I worked with him and later I was happy when he took a leadership in a local. After a while, it turned out that he had an affair, kicking his wife out of the house. His wife was so depressed that she killed herself. The news made a big wave in the community and the peasants in the community got upset, saying that how come a leader in the peasant movement could engage in such an immoral act. It hampered the development of the local.
It was physically demanding work to walk around or scooter around the towns at
night after hard daily work in the fields. Yet, their commitment for social justice
propelled them to work. Kwangsik remembered,
I had meetings every nights and I used a scooter to drive around to town meetings. It was difficult to attend meetings after daily work but I didn’t feel it. In several places, newmy on locals had been organized and the joy of organizing success overpowered the physical difficulty. In local meetings, we made a list of what to do and made sure everyone was doing alright in their tasks.
The commitment for peasant movement and social justice played a key role
in the work of the Kiho and Sunhee couple. Kiho came to his community full of
passion and commitment for social justice and his community didn’t have a peasant
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union either at the time.
He recalled his initial thought,
I was full of passion and I was determined to change the so-called “undongpan.” I was 32 at the time and I was kind of old among student activists but I was the youngest when I came to my community. I didn’t have anything except the passion.
I went to the person to whom I was introduced. He was living alone and we began to work together to organize a peasant union. I walked around the community with him every day and met lots of peasants. I devoted everything I had to organize them. I did everything if they asked for me to help them in their farming work. I worked for them during the days and talked with them at night. I was confident and I didn’t feel afraid of anything at the time.
Kiho and Sunhee began work in their community in spite of all the
difficulties, such as hard labors and financial difficulties, and it was their
commitment to enable them to overcome the barriers. Kiho explained that he tried to
be frank with the peasants from the beginning when he met them.
Sik: Did they know you were a university graduate? Don’t they think you were a stranger?
Kiho: Yeah, they did at first. Whenever I met them, I frankly talked to them that I came here to organize peasants. I did organizing while I was working for other peasants in my community. When I worked with them, I really worked hard and ate everything they gave me at breakfast or lunch (traditionally, the elders in Korea like people who ate well). I also drank a lot of Magulli (Korean wine). So the peasants liked me and they called me “daehaksang” (university student). I did my best to organize but I didn’t do it by myself. I did it through the local peasant leader. After the daily work, he and I had time to talk about what we did in organizing at night and I made some suggestions. During the day, I just followed him and helped him to organize peasants. I spent a year like that. I have been working here for 16 years and I guess the initial days were the best time in my life. At the time, I was confident, very active, with nothing to afraid of. I had nothing to lose. The peasants with whom I worked during the time turned into 70s now. They still liked me and very nice to me.
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Sunhee explained her situation when she moved in to the community.
The peasants didn’t think I was normal. I was a university graduate and I was young. There were no reasons for me to stay in the community in a time when young people in peasant communities fled to cities in search of jobs, leaving the elders and women. This community didn’t have young people at the time so that some peasants were glad. They thought that newcomers like me and my husband would bring new blood to the aging community.
Kiho explained how he started organizing in his community.
I didn’t know the peasants in this community at first. I got to know them through work. I worked with them during the days and told them that I was going to stop by their homes to play. At nights, I visited them and talked a lot. In this way, I got to know most of peasants in my community.
Sunhee recalled how she and her husband worked in the community,
My husband canvassed around all towns in my community. myonEach had 36 towns and he hopped around all towns to meet peasants. So I think he knew almost everyone in the region. No one knew many peasants than him in this community.
She added on that,
When we visited a town, we were not going there simply to meet some peasants, We tried to understand the town’s special situation and what kind of relationship the peasants had in their communities.
As a result of the organizing, the regional local had been established on
September 15 in 1991. It was a year later when Kiho came to his community and he
recalled that about 70 peasants attended the official ceremony. After that, Kiho
continued to do his work.
I didn’t take any position in the local union. I livedDuksan in myon at the time and most of members came fromDuksan. So I told the local president that you took responsibility for this community and I would go to a different Myon to organize. I had a peasant friend living Chopyongin and he was
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vice president in the local but hisMyon didn’t have many members. I asked him to find a house for me and I went there.
He explained why he went to a differentMyon.
We successfully launchedGun local but the union didn’t have its roots. So I decided to solve the problem by organizingMyon locals. I set up a goal which was to organize a Myon local. I talked about the union whenever I met peasants and explained why peasants need a union and how to join the union. I had two peasant friends whom I met in organizingGun local. I met them frequently and discussed about the importance of the union. It took time for me to get their trust and I had to drink a lot with them. Finally, they decided to join me in organizingMyon locals. We agreed on the fact that theGun local with no supports ofMyon locals was like a castle in the air.
With these two peasants, Kiho devoted his time to organize themyon local. A year
later, the local started its official work. He happily remembered the day,
When we had an official party for theMyon local, we had 73 members, which was more than the members we got when we launched theGun local. It was Feb. 28 in 1993. We had the ceremony right in front of theMyon office and we invited Chong Kwang Hun, who was a leader in the KPL, as a guest speaker. One of the peasants I worked with in the organizing process became a local president and the other became a secretary. But I didn’t take any position inMyon local either as I did before inGun local.
While Kiho kept working on organizingmyon locals in his community, Sunhee
joined him in 1991 and they began to work together.
When I came here, I didn’t think of organizing women peasants separately under the name of women peasant union at the time. I thought we could work together under a peasant union. But there were separate organizations. I was a member of both the peasant union and women peasant union but I worked actively in the peasant union.
Sunhee explained that how hard it was to sustain their commitment.
When we were in universities, we thought that we had to become labor workers and peasants and many students turned themselves into labor workers and peasants. But when I look around now, it is difficult to find student activists who successfully turned themselves into the leaders of labor
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workers and peasants. I didn’t think it is because of their personal faults. It might be. But the main reason they gave up their dream was, I think, the harsh reality. When they engaged in student movement, they only need to care about themselves but when they became labor workers and peasants, they had family to support and the burden was hard to bear.
Myongho and Younghee’s community already had a local so that they could
get help from the local when they settled down in their community. At first, they
helped the local to establish its work and actively joined the peasant struggles
organized by the local. Younghee reflected on the role of student activists in peasant
locals.
When student activists came to the peasant communities, they used to work for their local for a while. I think the reason was that the activist knew how to establish institutional work of the local unions with their experience in student unions. They were good at preparing organizational seminars and documents. I think the student activists contributed to the establishment of peasant unions in many places.
She also explained her devotion to the peasant cause.
When I came here, the KPL and the local were organizing many rallies to advance peasant movement. I joined the rallies with other members. At the time, I was raising mushrooms and it required my full attention. But when I had a lot of rallies like these days, it was difficult to give enough attention to the crop. I did what the local needed at the expense of my personal work so that my husband and I had several arguments.
Myongho reflected on the days.
At the time, KPL was organizing antigovemment rallies because the government didn’t pay attention to protecting Korean agriculture. President Kim Young Sam, at first, said that he would give up his presidential position rather than opening a rice market. Even though president Kim was not a military general and became a president through election, we didn’t regard him as legitimate president since he was elected by the support of an old established group of the former military regimes. We called it‘Munmin Dokjae ’(Civilian Dictatorship). We thought that we could achieve what we
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wanted by seizing state power so that we organized lots of anti-government rallies.
He kept reflecting on the early struggles.
In 1994 and 1995, we kept raising the issues related to the opening of agriculture market. Then we changed our focus into government agriculture policies, health care, and debts of peasant households. Whenever we had rallies related to those issues, I tried to organize peasants. I met peasants and listened to their stories. Also I explained the meaning of the rallies, encouraging them to attend the rallies. It was difficult for me to organize peasants. To the peasants in my community, I was an outsider and a university graduate. They thought that I was different from them.
All participants faced harsh reality in their communities but they overcame it with
their commitment for peasant movement and social justice which was identified as a
key factor in educators’ works (Daloz, Keen, Keen, & Parks, 1996; English, 2002;
Ilsley, 1990; Scott, 1992). Myongho expected that the life as a peasant was going to
be harder under the current circumstances but he said that he would continue to fight.
Peasants have warm hearts and I think I’m forgetting the difficulties I had before. At the time, it was really hard to live as a peasant but as time went by, the memory is getting blurred. I think life will be getting harder and harder for peasants. Having thought about it, the present won’t be bad. I think engaging in the peasant movement is good for my psychological health. As a group, we can change society and the experience of bringing social change made us empowered. Peasants are learning they can transform a society toward a more equitable and just society by their collective action. This possibility and the hope for social change helped me endure current problems.
Horton encouraged educators to get out of their boxed lives and found space in
which they could work for social change.
The only way these pockets can be found is to get outside the traditional sort of things that everybody else is doing and identify with these people— in terms of their deep knowledge—that limited reforms don’t help. I had to spend a long time down in Johns Island before people would really confide
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in me and talk to me so I could get a feel of where they were. I’m sure that in all times in history there are little places where things are beginning to develop, but I don’t think you can arrive at that intellectually or by making surveys or taking polls or things of that kind. (Freire & Horton, 1990, p. 95)
The lives of the activists clearly supported Horton’s argument: Educators
need to act. To act, they needed a pedagogy of commitment. It was not their
understanding of social structure and it was not the result of their social study. It
was their commitment that helped the activists join the peasants and learn together,
creating new knowledge for a better society (Welton, 1995). Cabral (1970) argued
that the petty bourgeoisie could choose to work for the revolution and the mass, but
he asserted that it required class suicide of the petty bourgeoisie. In the same sense,
Collins (1995) eloquently called on adult educators to work with the less privileged
with a commitment for social justice rather than to focus on personal advancement
and technical learning.
Vocation refers to a calling and entails firm commitment to the performance of worthwhile activities that are not merely calculated to advance personal career aspirations or fulfill minimum job expectations. It incorporates a strong ethical dimension, emphasizing an unavoidable necessity to make judgments about what should or should not be done and a readiness to take sides on significant issues. This pre-eminence of ethical considerations as a basis for day-to-day practice contrasts with the kind of pedagogical orientations and practices that are shown in previous chapters to be steered largely by technical rationality. Efficiency and expertise are secondary to the larger issues of human fulfillment and equality. They are not sufficient conditions for the development of a more just and humane society. Vocation stresses personal responsibility on the part of the practitioner that cannot be abrogated by technicist prescriptions and preconceived formulations characterizing a cult of efficiency. It entails careful, self-conscious reflection about one's work—an intellectual commitment, (p. 40)
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Pedagogy of Building Relationship
As the activists turned themselves into peasants, some students turned
themselves into labor workers to organize the workers during the 1980s in Korea.
The military regime at the time was watching closely to detect the students, and the
student activists used false names to get their jobs in factories as well as avoid
possible arrests. When they found out the problems in their factories, some of them
immediately acted and demanded the companies to fix the problems. A similar case
was illustrated in a book which collected the stories of union building during the
Great Labor Strike in 1987 (Inchon Christian Popular Education Research Center,
1988). The story began in a company which produced pianos and it didn’t give the
workers a bonus, as well as monthly leaves to which they were entitled. A student-
turned-worker made a complaint to the management and requested that the problem
be corrected. The management figured out her background and fired her right before
summer vacation. Since the worker didn’t have much relationship with other
workers, her argument, in spite of its rightfulness, didn’t get much attention from
the other workers and she had to leave while others rushed to their summer
vacations. Later, a different woman began to have interest in organizing a union.
Unlike the student-tumed-worker, she had been worked for the company for several
years and she was known as a big sister who always cared about other young
workers. When she began organizing, many workers were willing to join her. The
workers didn’t understand the situation perfectly but they believed that if she
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wanted to do something, it would be the right thing to do. The stark contrast
between the student-tumed-worker and the big sister worker seemed instructive to
understand the importance of relationships in organizing.
Many feminist writers placed the importance of building relationship in
women’s learning (Flannery & Hayes, 2001; Barr, 1999). African-American
educators also suggested that building relationship played a key role in their
learning (Asante, 1987; Hunn, 2004; Schiele, 1994). Koreans, traditionally, valued
relationship much more than individual competition, and they regarded having good
relationships with others in the community as a good virtue. The activists learned
from the failures of their friends and recognized the importance of building
relationship in their work.
When the activists came to their communities, first and foremost they began
to build personal relationships with peasants in communities to get across their ideas
of the peasants movement. Many peasants did not understand why people with
university degrees wanted to become peasants with a much lower social status and
lower incomes. Some of them believed that the students came to their communities
to agitate a communist revolution. Others didn’t understand the students’ motives
but sympathized with the students because they believed the students came here to
help them.
In such situations, the most important job for the activists was that they had
to be accepted as peasants and community members. They knew the peasants
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wouldn’t buy into the propagandas of the outsiders. Kiho strongly expressed his
opinion about how to start the relationship.
First, we need to be peasants and that means that we have our own fields and work. Some of students came to the countryside for peasant movements but they never did farming. They worked for the KPL (Korean Peasant League) locals. They went to their offices for several years and then left. I would say that it is not good. They are office peasants. We should become real peasants. For that, we have to build our own farms with our own sweat. That is the only way by which we can turn ourselves into peasants.
He keenly understood that he had to work hard as a peasant to be a part of
the peasant community. He criticized some student activists who went to peasant
communities but only worked for the local without direct contact with peasants in
farming work. As Freire (2000) said, the activists need to be reborn in their work
with the oppressed.
Kiho explained how he worked when he came to the community.
I was introduced to a peasant who lent me 80magiki. I took care of all the land and he gave me 15magiki. I worked hard during the days and walked around my community to organize peasants. I didn’t have any agriculture machines so that when I needed machines I went to peasants who had the machines, worked for them, and borrowed the tools. It was like this. If I worked for the peasants for five days, I could borrow the machines for a day. One day I was working with a tractor I borrowed and the tractor owner came to me and wanted me to return it. It was really busy season and I was behind the schedule.
Kwangsik and Sora concurred with Kiho. In their case, they first joined the
peasants’ direct action and then began their farming work. For peasants in the region,
they regarded the couple as activists rather than peasants. In order to overcome the
prejudice and to be accepted as peasants, the couple worked hard in their field as
well as political actions with peasants. Sora remembered:
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I worked on organizing wives in my communities. Basically, peasants in my community depended on rice to make living and I don’t have time to try other crops. If I calculate how I assigned my time in the beginning of my work in my community, I spent 70% of my time on organizing a peasant union and the rest on farming. Even though I devoted most of my time to organizing, it didn’t mean I shrugged off my responsibility as a peasant. I worked hard in my rice fields, and I made a yield as much as other peasants. You know, some hakchuls often were criticized due to their inability to handle their farming in peasant communities and I don’t want to be a part of such activists. My husband and I worked hard to manage the crop even though we were so busy organizing. As a result, the elders in my community began to give good remarks on our work as peasants. In my case, the elders knew I came from a city and had no experience in farming. So when they saw me working hard on a hot summer day, they were surprised and gave me a credit for that.
Myoungho and Younghee couple expressed the same idea. They also
worked hard to be accepted as peasants in their community. Younghee reflected on
the first year of their work as peasants.
The first year, we suffered the damage caused by cold weather. It was a national disaster and it was quite a blow to peasants. Nationally, the yield of rice decreased 40-50% compared to a year before. Our yield decreased about 20%. We were busy participating in direct actions with the local but we worked hard to cope with the farming work. Whenever I missed the work to do, I bugged my husband and sometimes we got into an argument. We didn’t have enough experience so we were always behind the schedule in our farming work. But we had done what we had to do. We never gave up the work because of our engagement in direct actions.
Kiho also strongly argued that the activists should work with peasants with
their hearts. He understood that the peasants in his community were watching what
he did instead of what he said.
You have to work with peasants with sincerity. You can’t talk them into a movement. You have to approach them with affection and sincerity. Only then, people will trust you and you can go further.
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The process was slow but the activists continued to engage in building
relationships with peasants in their communities and they gradually expanded the
network. They didn’t throw out their idea of what to do in face of peasants and
patiently worked to build relationships.
Kiho explained the process of building a relationship,
I visited peasants’ houses to get to know them in every night. I just went to their homes, had conversations with them, and listened to them. I think we had to expand human relationship gradually. At first, you only knew a person but sooner or later this person will introduce you to a next person. We have to do it step by step. Meeting a lot of people was a starting point to expand the peasant movement.
The development of locals in Kiho’s community described well how
building relationships played a key role. Kiho began to identify potential leaders in
towns through his frequent visits and working in the fields. He visited them again
and again to build trust with them. Joining a peasant union was not an easy decision
under the oppressive political situation and they had to consider the possible
consequences of their actions. Kiho spent several nights talking with them while
drinking and sharing their life stories. It took time to build trust with them but since
he established a relationship with them, it went smoothly and he successfully
organized the local in a year. Matt Suarez, an organizer in the Civil Rights
movement, also expressed the importance of building relationships (Payne, 1995).
He mentioned that country folk
Deal more with the character of an individual rather than what he’s saying... When you met him, whatever way he was when you met, when you saw him ten years later.... he would still be that same way, ten years down the road. And they had much more of a perception about the real character of a man.
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They didn’t get caught up in images... A lot of people who came into Canton, [the local people] didn’t respond to and it was simply because they could see a lot of stuff that we couldn’t see about an individual. They knew who was strong and who was for real and who wasn’t... We would get caught up in words and logic. That didn’t mean nothing to them. They were dealing with motives and intent. Skip all the words and everything else. They brushed that aside and got right to what the individual was about. (Payne, 1995, p. 238)
Sunhee explained the condition of their community.
At the time, the Korean Peasants League was about to be launched and few peasants were engaging in the peasants movement. Under the oppressive situation, they had to risk their personal lives to join the peasant movement. So it was understandable for the peasants to hesitate to step forward.
Building relationship and mutual trust was a building block of their work for
Kwangsik and Sora. Kwangsik recalled how he built relationships with peasants in
his community.
I visited many towns in my regions. Whenever I visited other peasants, I stayed at their home, sharing concerns and drinking together. I had many peasants across the region with whom I had strong relationships. While staying at their homes, I got to know their family members and we were like a big family. I shared with them how other peasants were doing in their work. Sharing successful stories in organizing in different regions was very helpful. You know, the stories motivated them and encouraged them for future actions.
The activists’ commitment also made the peasants trust the intentions of the
activists. Kwansik said:
The peasants in the community watched carefully how the peasant activists worked and they began to accept the fact that the peasant activists worked for the cause of peasants instead of their personal interests. Since then, they began to believe the activists’ intention.
Kiho also expressed the same idea.
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At first, peasants in the community believed that only communists joined the peasant union, but now they began to acknowledge that the peasant union worked for the peasants themselves. But it took a long time to get such recognition.
Myongho and Younghee joined group meetings of peasants to make a
relationship in their community. The meetings were informal and for socializing
purposes while they were closely working with local union members. Myongho
remembered,
The meeting was called Chong-Nyon“ Hoe.'" According to the name, it was supposed to consist of 20s and 30s but most members were 40s and even 50s. We got together once a month. I hope that the meeting would be a place to raise consciousness but later the group was dissolved. The reason was that there was a rumor saying that factories would move into the community and we had to move out.
Younghee also had this kind of meeting with peasant women in the community. In
general, the activists actively engaged in building relationships in their initial period
of settlement in their communities. They talked with peasants, played with peasants,
worked with peasants, and dug into their communities. Through those daily
meetings, work, and informal meetings, the activists could understand their
communities better and got the sense of who would likely become leaders in their
communities.
The works of the peasants found a strong resemblance in the work of the
organizers in the Civil Rights movement. When asked how he organized a town,
Bob Moses, Civil Right activist, responded as follows:
“By bouncing a ball,” he answered quietly. “What?”
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“You stand on a street and bounce a ball. Soon all the children come around. You keep on bouncing the ball. Before long, it runs under someone’s porch and then you meet the adults.” (Payne, 1995, p. 243)
Payne (1995) further explained the meaning of his answer in his excellent book to explore the early organizing tradition in the Deep South.
Charles Sherrod, who directed SNCC’s work in southwest Georgia, commented that the whole key to organizing is finding one person other than yourself. Most of us would expect more “political” answers, but SNCC’s early organizers often portray much of their work as simply building relationships, (p. 243)
The organizers’ experience in the Civil Rights movement and their emphasis on
building relationships seemed quite similar to the Korean counterpart.
The relationship later began to develop into comradeship in their fight for
the peasant cause and the relationship stimulated learning for both the peasants and
the activists.
Pedagogy of Dialogue
Another pedagogy they developed in their practice was the pedagogy of
dialogue. Dialogue was an essential way of work and lives in their communities and
it took place in various places such as local meetings, home visits, and direct actions.
Dialogue helped both the activists and the peasants to develop their personal visions
and to articulate their actions strategically to advance the peasant movement. In
Pedagogy o f the Oppressed, Freire (2000) defines dialogue as follows:
Dialogue is the encounter between men, mediated by the world, in order to name the world. Hence, dialogue cannot occur between those who want to name the world and those who do not wish this naming—between those who
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deny others the right to speak their word and those whose right to speak has been denied them. (p. 88)
As in the definition, dialogue presumed the two parties which were willing to join
an active engagement in the new creation of knowledge through dialogue. It is an
active relationship in which the parties engaged in dialogue produced a new kind of
knowledge. So those who didn’t believe students’ ability to change society as well
as personal development wouldn’t enter into dialogue. When educators and
organizers denied the capability of students, dialogue was relegated into an
educational technique or method and learning was never realized (Adams, 1975;
Freire, 2001; hooks, 1994; Shor, 1992).
Flecha (2000) points out the problem of imposing ideas on students.
When a teacher imposes what he or she sees as truth under threat of failure for those who reject it students are confined by the walls of what is established as correct by authority; the teacher learns nothing, simply repeating what she or he already knows or takes to be true. (p. 2)
Vella (2002) also criticizes hierarchical relationships in education,
Consider the absolute certainty of many educational systems: This is the way it is! Uncertainty is an anathema. Such an educational system says: What I am teaching is doctrine, indisputable, sure.
Instead of the participation that honors the effect of context and culture on a learner’s perspective, this mechanistic approach demands a strict objectivity, (p. 31)
The activists were in a better position to initiate dialogue than other
educators because, first, they were comparatively free from hierarchical
relationships of formal education, and, second, their exposure in reality made them
recognize the weakness of their theoretical idea and respect peasants’ ideas
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developed in reality. However, it still didn’t guarantee that dialogue took place
naturally. They had to learn through their practices.
Their practices revealed that there were some preconditions for dialogue.
First, educators or organizers need commitment for those with whom they are
working. In the case of the activists, they believed that peasants could bring social
change to Korean society and worked with them to make the societal change
possible. By turning themselves into peasants, they crossed class lines, throwing out
their privileges as university graduates, which put them in a position where dialogue
might take place with the peasants. Second, the process of dialogue came along with
the process of building relationships. The better relationships they developed, the
more dialogue began.
Initially, dialogue took place informally. The activists met peasants in the
communities and listen to what they said. They had to build relationships with
peasants in order to begin dialogue with them, and the activists met peasants face-
to-face in fields and their homes for the purpose. They strenuously combed the
region to meet peasants. When they met peasants, they didn’t talk about their
political ideas. Rather, they listened to what the peasants said and what they hoped
for. Through these direct meetings, they began to see the gap between their abstract
idea and concrete reality of peasants. It was a learning process for them. Horton
strongly argues that educators need to know what was happening in students’ lives.
For example, we always had the practice at Highlander, back when I was director, of having the staff acquainted with the area in which we were working. There were two ways. We would respond to a student’s request for
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help or we’d just roam around the region to find out what was going on. We needed to know what was happening in the economic, social, and cultural realm where we were working, but we didn’t come in and make a lecture on it or write a book about it. We used this knowledge to have insights out of which we asked questions and led discussions. (Freire & Horton, 1990, p. 149)
In dialogue, formal hierarchical relationships between teachers and students
fall apart and both are engaged in learning together. By engaging in dialogue, both
the peasants and the activists learned. Peasants learned how political power made an
impact on their daily lives, and joined the peasant union while the activists began to
modify their abstract idea, creating a new vision for the future.
In Pedagogy o f the Oppressed, Freire (2000) explained the process of
conscientization of farmers. In order for peasants to be aware of their social context,
they have to problematize the world and they have to take back their ability to name
the world. This process for the activists was in reverse because most of them came
from comparatively affluent families with no experience in farming. As student
activists, they were radicalized by witnessing the injustice by military governments
and they studied Marxism to improve their activities in search for alternatives.
During their work as student activists, they studied Korean history, economy, and
philosophy in their study groups. As a result, they knew in what kinds of political
situations peasants live and they have a clear idea of what to do to change the
situation. They were good at explaining why peasants had to organize and fight
against the military regime. But they didn't know about the reality peasants were
facing in their daily lives. They were nothing but novices in the new settings.
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Horton (1990) expresses the same experience when he began the
Highlander Folk School.
When we first started Highlander, we had ideas that we tried to apply to a situation. We started by moving from theory to practice. It took us only a few months to learn that we were starting the wrong way, because we weren’t reaching the people. We realized it was necessary to learn how to learn from these people, so we started with the practical, with the things that were, and we moved from there to test our theories and our ways of thinking. We reversed the usual process; instead of coming from the top down and going from the theoretical to the practical, trying to force the theory on the practice, we learned you had to take what people perceive their problems to be, not what we perceive their problems to be. (p. 140)
In addition, they had the image of revolutionary peasants who were wiling
to risk their lives for the peasant movement and they were expecting and preparing
for an imminent revolution. Yet, when they entered into dialogue with the peasants,
the responses they got were totally different from their abstract idea. Many peasants
were reluctant to step forward for social justice and the revolution seemed far away.
It should come down to earth from revolutionary images in the books. Dialogue
with the peasants made them realize the problems they had and it was in dialogue
that they recreated their new vision for their future action.
Sunhee told her story of redeveloping her vision.
We can’t change the world with only dream. If I kept the dream which I had as a student, I couldn’t be here now. Because people are so conservative, the peasant’s financial situation is so desperate, and the life is so hard in reality. I only had vague idea when I was in a university. It was rather a concern than a plan about how I could practice what I believe was right. I didn’t have a clear plan and didn’t have enough preparation for my future work as a peasant. But I believe I succeeded to transform myself into a peasant since I came here to work. As a result, I can see the reality more clearly and I believe that the peasant movement is not only for peasants. There is something we can’t explain from class-based analysis in peasant movement.
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Each nation has its own unique history and Korea has been an agricultural society for most of its history. The peasant population dropped to less than 10% of the total population but keeping the tradition of the peasant is like keeping 5,000 years of Korean tradition.
In a similar way, Younghee reflected on how she has been changed since she came
to the community,
The experience of student activism paved my way of life but since then I have been changed. At that time, I was in a hurry. Develop political consciousness of peasants quickly and organize them quickly. But I'm not such a hasty mode any more and I know that I can't change people overnight.
Sik: Does this mean that you have to lower your vision?
It doesn't mean that I'm giving up the revolutionary vision. It just meant I'm now thinking social changes in a much broader way. Back, then, I thought we need to seize the power to bring about changes but I think we need more to bring change. Seizing power doesn't guarantee the better society.
Horton’s reflection (1990) on his life seemed to echo the activists’ reflection for the
long haul.
I had to come to grips with this when I realized that the capitalist system was more viable than I had thought. It had more ways of lasting than I had understood from my experiences in the Depression, when a lot of people, including me, thought that capitalism was on its last legs. When I finally found out it wasn’t even limping, that Roosevelt’s job was to make it work, and he did make it work, I realized that you had to slow down the fire, because you’d bum up the fuel and it would be over. That’s when I started trying to calm myself down, and grasped that the revolution had to be built step by step, that it wasn’t going to come as a great explosion automatically. It had to be made, or it wouldn’t happen, (p. 81)
Dialogue with peasants also helped the activists to get over the naive
understanding of peasants. When they were in universities, they read lots of
revolutionary novels in which peasants and labor workers heroically risked their
lives and achieved revolutionary goals. It was the ideal image of the oppressed as a
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group that the activists brought to their communities. But the idea had been
shattered when they moved in and they had to learn a realistic view from their own
experience. Kwangsik expressed his naive conception of revolutionary peasants at
the beginning of his work.
It is rather a psychological issue. When I was young, I believed that I had to have unconditional love for peasants because they were the key members of the oppressed in my country. But peasants in reality were not revolutionary as much were in revolutionary novels. Worse, they acted very selfishly and it broke my nai've idea of revolutionary peasants. Yet,hakchul need to get over the naive idea to move on.
The Myongho and Younghee couple told a similar experience at the beginning of
their work in their community. Myongho reflected on his experience,
At first, I learned by copying what other peasants did and I followed what they told me. I thought vaguely that peasants knew better as a key force in a future revolution. For example, they told me to spray chemicals to kill grass on the banks of my rice paddy so I did. But later it turned out to be a wrong idea. You know why? When rain poured, the bank couldn’t hold up because it didn’t have any grass on it.
Younghee also described a similar encounter:
Every peasant insisted that their way of farming was the right way. But at the time, we didn't know that. I thought I had to keep a low profile so just follow what they told me, which caused lots of problems. When I got some advice from peasants, I just followed it. If they said, "do it this way" and I did. If they said, "do it that way, and I did. Simply, I just followed what they told me. I didn't recognize the fact that they were telling me only their experience.
Unlike others, Kiho didn’t have such experience. Rather, he criticized many
student activists who had a misconception about the role of peasants.
Hakchul misunderstood the nature of peasants and labor workers. They used to say that labor workers are the leading class in future revolution. But the existence of labor class doesn't make the revolution indispensable. We had to
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get into the labor workers and peasants to bring revolution. It is not coming automatically.
By turning themselves into peasants and throwing themselves out into reality
and by engaging dialogue with the peasants, they began to see through the weakness
of their previous abstract idea. When they were in school, their vision was to build a
democratic and equal society, which was tilted toward a socialist nation, and they
believed they could achieve the aim through armed struggles in a short period of
time. But they began to realize that it would take time to bring about social change
and began to articulate the change in the long haul as well as broadening the concept
of social change instead of only focusing on seizing state power through armed
struggles.
Learning in Social Action
In their communities, the student activists-tumed-peasants activists engaged
in many actions including direct actions, local organizing, and union education. All
those actions were generating useful knowledge through their collective and
personal reflection on their actions. Four key themes emerged out of those
reflections: (1) local vs. national, (2) the significance of political alliance, (3)
personal transformation, and (4) growing gender awareness. The first theme
explored how the activists learned to strike a balance between their work for a
national organization and their community work. The second theme examined the
importance of political alliance in their work, and the third theme followed their
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personal transformation while they were engaging in the movement. The last theme
revealed the growing awareness of gender in their collective work, especially among
the women activists.
Local vs. National
The activists were the members of the Korean Peasants League (KPL) and
some of them were the founding members of their locals. They worked hard to
organize their communities. The national organization set the agendas and
supported the locals in organizing efforts. KPL was established in 1990 and has
played a key role in advancing the peasant movement and Korean democracy
against military regimes. When the KPL tried to organize rallies to support their
agenda, it asked its locals to participate in their national efforts to organize. The
activists worked hard to organize in their communities but sometimes it was hard to
make a balance between the readiness of their communities and the needs of the
national organization. Myongho reflected on the issue.
KPL sent us a schedule of protests but it is almost impossible to meet all the demands. At first, we thought that we had to do it whatever it takes if the organization tells us to do, but I don't think that way now. I have to consider my community first. If it is ready, I can happily join the scheduled fighting but if it is not, I won't do it. It will ruin my community. My community is base for me.
Kwangsik expressed the same concern: “In organizing rallies for several
years, it turns into a routine. KPL members attended the rallies but that's it.”
They began to recognize the importance of their own communities and putting more
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importance on the bottom-up process than simply following orders from the national
organization. Under a military regime, the role of the national organization loomed
large and it made a great contribution to bring democracy. But the political situation
has been changed and their ways of organizing needed to be changed.
Kwangsik explained the change in his local union.
In our previous work, the city local union made an initiative, waging symbolic protests against governments, andGun locals followed the lead of the city union. But we're changing the way. When there were the issues concerning communities, we joined their efforts to fix the problems. For example, we have lots of community issues such as waste facility, city developments, and the United States military camps. The peasants organized groups to solve the problems but they did not know how to proceed in their work. We sent our members to each groups and worked together. By working together, our locals could expand its influence and many peasants in the communities began to look at the locals differently.
Sunhee also expressed that she began to know the importance of community in
the peasant movement.
I believe that we need to protect Korean agriculture. I thought about peasants but I didn’t think much of communities where peasants lived. Now I think that peasant movement should fight to make peasants living in their communities doing what they want instead of being forced out of their communities.
Horton insists that there is a difference between organizing and education in
dialogue with Freire. Horton stresses:
Now an organizer’s job, one who wasn’t an educator, would be to get that contract the best way he could. That wouldn’t have been a problem for him— to tell them what he thought was the best way to deal with that situation. His purpose was to get the organization’s goal achieved, you see. And that’s what an organizer’s job is. An organizer’s job is not to educate people as a prime consideration. His job is to accomplish a limited, specific goal. I’m not saying it isn’t a wonderful goal for the people. I’m not saying it isn’t valuable. I’m just saying there’s a difference between organizing and
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education, and I think there’s a very important distinction. (Freire & Horton, 1990, p. 127)
Horton continues to argue that “if there’s a choice, we’d sacrifice the goal of
the organization for helping the people grow, because we think in the long run if s a
bigger contribution” (Freire & Horton, 1990, p. 116). The activists came to the same
conclusion through their practices.
In the beginning of their work, they used to focus on organizing locals but
later they began to place more importance on peasants’ learning in their
communities. Myongho remembered his early days.
At first, I tried to make peasants join my local as many as I could. Having more members in my local seemed important at that time and I also talked them into direct actions of the KPL. But right now I have a different view on that. I think it is not a good idea to force peasants to join actions when they are not ready. Rather, the more important thing is to offer peasants opportunities to reflect on their conditions and let them decide what they can do to change the situation. We, as activists, can work to develop various opportunities for peasants.
As he said, his initial work went along with the political schedule of the KPL, but he
began to recognize that education was much more important than the short-term
goal of the peasant organization. The contents of education should start from where
peasants were rather than from where the activists were.
In the same sense, Freire (2000) stressed the following:
The starting point for organizing the program content of education or political action must be the present existential concrete situation reflecting the aspirations of the people. Utilizing certain basic contradictions we must pose this essential situation to the people as a problem which challenges them and requires a response, not just at the intellectual level, but at the level of action, (p. 95)
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Yet, Freire (1978) also reminds educators of the importance of making a balance
between local and national.
Without losing the vision of the total plan for the society, the local conditions of the area where work is begun must be kept in mind when the definition of what needs to be known is made; that is, in the organization of the programmatic content of literacy and post-literacy education. It is on the basis of these local conditions that the more general situation is understood. Thus, every generative word ought to make possible an analysis which, starting with the local, is then naturally extended to the regional, national, continental and, finally, to the universal, (p. 114)
Younghee had the same concern in her work in the center.
I thought that my work in the women peasants’ center would contribute to the advancement of the peasant movement. However, Korean Peasant Women Association worried about the situation because many women peasant activists couldn’t work for the national organization to work in the centers. Emotional conflicts between the organization and the activists took place several times.
For Kiho, his community was more important than anything else. In 2001, the KPL
asked him to be an officer in charge of developing policies for the organization but
he refused the offer.
If I had gone to the KPL, I wouldn’t have been here. If I stayed away from my community, I would be an outsider again. When I work here in the community, I can frequently meet the peasants. I can work with them. I can play with them. When I was among the peasants in my community, they accepted me as a peasant like them. That’s why I decided to stay in my community.
He knew that working hard to build his community through education would pay off
in the lo n grun. Crowther (1999) captures the essence of the activists’ learning:
“Moreover, in thinking globally and acting locally, connections can be made
between such local action and national and, indeed, international struggles” (p. 36).
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Personal Transformation
The activists have experienced a personal transformation while they were
engaging in their work. In the field of adult education, the relation between
personal transformation and social transformation has been a hot issue (Collard, &
Law, 1989; Hart, 1990; Mezirow, 1991; Taylor, 2000). But the recent trend tends to
isolate personal transformation from social transformation, focusing on the
development of individual learners. This trend has been contested by critical adult
educators who are insisting on understanding individual learners in social contexts.
They believed that engaging in social actions to change society can trigger personal
transformation (Freire & Horton, 1990; Hart, 1992; Horton, 1990). Phyllis
Cunningham (2000) rightfully points out the misconception.
In fact, much of the field’s rhetoric centers on the learners, as if learners are disembodied creatures and as if the social context in which we all exist does not affect the processes of education, (p. 573)
She continues,
Another aspect of this cult of individualism is that we as educators stress personal transformation rather than social transformation. It is the individual that is the unit of analysis, rarely society. This leads to interesting conceptualizations. We psychologize learning, we build a deficiency discourse about marginalized groups, and we foster a politicization of our life world. That’s why we can’t and don’t know how to critique structures.
Freire also stressed the dialogical relation between the learners and their
social context, arguing that people can learn while they engage in collective
struggles. This relation seemed strong in the activists’ learning process. While they
engaged in their collective work, the activists went through their personal
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transformations. They became the leaders of their communities, they became better
peasants in terms of skills, they became better organizers, and they became better in
dialogue with the peasants. The learning from personal transformation in their
collective work was tremendous.
Myongho, while working in his community, developed his interest in
sustainable agriculture. He also believed that old peasants obtained rich knowledge
from their lifetime experience, but he pointed out that the rich experience is
disappearing with the aging peasants passing away.
I’m trying to learn from old peasants. They had a rich knowledge of farming work but few have been transferred to the next generation. They obtained the knowledge through their lifetime experience and I think it is extremely important to learn from their knowledge. I’m really sorry for the current situation in which the rich experience is going away with the death of the old peasants. We have to learn the knowledge but few peasants are willing to do so. Old peasants can tell the condition of rice when they took a look at its color. How about young peasants like us? We put the rice in the analyzer and get the result from the machine. We just turn to machines and become the slaves of machines. To learn from the old peasants, we have to ask for advice from old peasants. It is a big mistake to ignore knowledge based on the experience of old peasants.
Younghee explained how she and her husband changed their way of farming.
At first, I just followed what other peasants told me to do and I used chemicals for 2 years. Then I began to think that it was not a good idea to use chemicals. Also, KPL was suggesting “Taepyung Nongbup as ” an alternative way instead of using chemicals. InTaepyung Nongbup, peasants doesn’t till soil and plant new rice besides the old ones. I used this way for about two years and I didn’t use chemicals since 1998.1 think it took several years to work with no chemicals. I also used mud snails to get rid of grass in my rice paddy.
Myoungho stressed that
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I began to adapt organic farming because I believed that labor workers and peasants deserved high quality food. They were the ones who should enjoy such nice food given their roles in society. So I didn’t put an expensive price tag on my products. Organic food is not for the rich.
The Myongho and Younghee couple joined a peasant group which studied
about sustainable agriculture. In his interview, Myongho suggested an
environmental friendly or organic farming as a way to eliminate the current
economic difficulty of peasants. In his community, he became a front-runner to lead
an environment-friendly agriculture.
While working with the local, Younghee began to have an interest in
women’s issues in the region, which led to the opening of a regional women
peasants center. In an interview at the center, she explained how she participated in
the process of opening the center.
This is the Women Peasants Center and we made it in 2002. Currently, I’m in charge of this center. For a long time, woman peasants kept insisting that they needed childcare systems as well as other cultural center for their educational needs. Under president Kim Dae Jung, a woman peasant activist who made the suggestion became an official in the Agriculture Department, turning the suggestion into a government policy which didn’t equal the original version of the Korean Peasant League. The government opened four centers around the nation in 2001 and later opened two centers inDo. each When the Agriculture Department got their budget for the program, they began to accept applications from organizations which wanted to run the centers. I, with other women peasants in this community, worked together and applied for it and we got it. From 2002 to 2004, 50% of the annual budget came from the government, regional government paid 35%, and the rest of them were paid by the centers by themselves. Now, the central government didn’t give any financial support and the regional governments paid 85% and the centers paid the rest. In the center, we are required to have basic programs such as a child care program, after-school program, educational and cultural programs.
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The center became a meeting place and resource center for women peasants
in the region and she worked hard to establish programs of the center with other
women peasants. She briefly explained what kinds of programs have been offered in
the center.
We invited an expert on traditional food to the center and had women peasants learn how to cook traditional food. As you know, these days people just bought what they wanted to eat and didn’t know about the traditional food. Also, we did have a lot of seminars with diverse subjects. It covers parental education,Han-ji (Korean traditional paper) crafts, fairy tale reading class, sewing class, dyeing class. After the each class, we encouraged the participants to form a small group and continued to work as a group. For example, when we held parental education class, about 40 women peasants came and 10 women made a group to study together. They worked together for two years.
She believed that the work of the center contributed to the expansion of the peasant
movement in her community. Many women participants were surprised that the
women peasant local played a key role in developing the center. They tended to
think that the local mainly was working on political issues.
Kwangsik confirmed his personal transformation through his work.
Before I came here, I learned to two things which I thought would help me to adapt to the new life. One was acupuncture and the other wasPungmul (musical instruments for Korean traditional music). It was really useful when I began my work here and I think I had to continue to work to change my character.
I was very introverted when I was in a university and I tried to change it. But it wasn’t easy. Later, when I came to my community, I had to meet lots of peasants. While meeting and talking with them, my character has been changed.
In his active work to organize the local, he could change his character and he also
became a leader among peasants in his community.
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I am very young as a local president. When I came here, the peasant movement was not active in this region so I became a secretary of theDo local. I was at least 10 years younger compared to the secretaries of other regions.
He reflected on his life.
When I came here 20 years ago, I didn’t know any one in this community. Since then, I became a local president, an auditorNongHyup in (Agriculture Cooperate), and a village head. Many peasants can recognize my name in this community. I thought about my past and future. Based on my reflection, I’m going to put my name in an election for president of the localNongHyup. It has been considered as a government organization among peasant activists. Some activists still think that it is for personal glory if someone wants to be a president of localNonghyup. But I think that there is something I can do and I think it is important to take positions inNonghyup to advance the peasant movement.
Sora was organizing women peasants in her community as well as working
for the Korean Women Peasant League. She also began to attend a study group after
she finished a three-month course of counseling education on domestic violence in a
feminist organization in Seoul.
I’m attending the meetings because I didn’t have much time to think about the gender issue in my community work. Since attending the meetings, the notion that personal is politics hit the nail on my head. I’m getting aware of gender issue in my community as well as my personal relationship with my husband.
She mentioned that the participation in the meetings and educational course helped
her understand women’s situations in her community. She expressed her surprise,
I was surprised at the rate of domestic violence. It doesn’t seem real to me. I never thought such a huge number of women are suffering from domestic violence. During the class, I had a chance to observe the real counseling process and it was a shock to me.
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Kiho become president of the local union after spending several years of
organizing in his community. He intentionally didn’t take any position in the local
for several years. He expressed his view on the issue.
I think peasant activists like us don’t need to take position in local unions. We should play the role of making peasants as leaders in local unions instead of taking positions by ourselves. For six years, I just worked hard to organize the local but I didn’t take any position. Peasants in the community see me participating in the activities of the local and they knew I was taking care of huge rice fields. So they wondered who I was at first.
Kiho’s view sounded similar to the idea of Myles Horton, who sent a severe
warning to organizers and educators who thought of them as experts.
If people who want to be experts want to tell people what to do because they think it’s their duty to tell them what to do, to me that takes away the power of people to make decisions. (Freire & Horton, 1990, p. 130)
Later, Kiho rose to the leadership of the local and became the local president. As
president, he continued to develop his leadership. Especially he had an interest in
developing educational programs in the local.
While working, I realized the importance of educational programs in the locals. Peasants didn’t have much time to study. So I tried to open some educational programs inMyons where peasants can study history and politics as well as other related subjects. When I worked forDo local, I made an educational program called “Peasant University.” We recruited students from all Myon locals. More importantly, I think we need to train lecturers among peasants in my community.
He also closely worked with the Democratic Labor Party.
KPL declared that it worked with DLP but it wasn’t compulsory. It wasn’t necessary for all members of the union to be party members. Among peasants, a different preference for political parties existed and we have to accept the difference.
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In the case of Kiho, he became a better leader in his work for the peasant movement
and there is no separation between personal transformation and social
transformation. It goes together.
Sunhee is commuting to Seoul to work for the Korean Peasant Women
Association in 2005. She is a director of the policy planning committee. Working in
the national organization gave her a national perspective on her idea.
Organizationally, we have separate organizations for peasants and women peasants but it is almost impossible to make a distinction between peasants and women peasants inmyons where peasants lives. Most of the peasants were the elderly and women peasants took the lion’s share of the elderly. In this situation, KPL must find a way to accept women peasants as a key force in the peasant movement and peasant activists should work hard to organize women peasants in their communities.
The activists had different working conditions but commonly showed that they
could develop themselves as better leaders and better persons in their collective
work.
Another common theme in their personal transformation was that they were
more open to different ideas than before. Many expressed this idea.Kiho reflected
on his experience.
I think I'm willing to listen to different ideas than before. At first, when I heard something I didn’t agree, I immediately criticized it but I don't do it anymore. I just accept the different opinions. If I keep insisting with my opinion, I might get their temporary approval but I think it is meaningless. I need to respect their opinions and I need to start from where they are instead of forcing my idea.
Sunhee also mentioned that,
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People in my community all have different ideas. If you simply reject the ideas, you can't work with them. Or if you simply accept their idea, you're staying where they are. We have to work together and change ideas together.
Kwangsik expressed the same idea: “If there is something I learned from the
experience in my community, it would be that I got more open-minded than before.”
The personal development of the activists in their collective learning seemed
also instructive to the argument around social movement in adult education. Finger
(1989) criticized the old social movement for its failure to understand personal
learning, presenting several concepts developing from new social movement as
follows: (1) experiential learning, (2) learning through consternation, (3) holistic
learning, and (4) identity learning. Fie continued to argue,
All of these concepts share the core characteristic of the new movement’s conception of adult transformations: adult learning has to do with the social life of the whole person and therefore with the person’s life experiences. It takes its emotional energy from this life and contributes to the build-up of a person’s identity. Transformation must therefore be thought and practiced from the point of view of the person; in the crisis of modernity, the person rather than history becomes the subject of adult learning.
He insightfully embraced the new social movement as a place for adult learning as
well as pointing out the problems caused by modernity. But he failed to see an
active connection between the old social movement and the new social movement,
as evidenced by the learning process of the student activists-tumed-peasant activists.
The activists in their praxis were overcoming the problems of old social movements.
Sora shared her story.
When I reflect on my past, I think it was a problem of my generation who went through university life during the 1980s, I think I tried to mold myself to a frame which the revolutionary period demanded without understanding
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myself. In our culture, it was severely criticized to pursue personal interests when the nation was suffering under military dictatorships. Think about it. If university students had make-up or went on picnic, they were tarnished as no-brainers. The mindset was, “How come? When people are dying in a fight against military dictatorship?” I think we need to change that.
The activists went through the revolutionary period and devoted their lives
to bring democracy to the nation. As a result, the military regime caved in and a
civil government took power but the activists were still working for a more
equitable society, adjusting their ways of working to the new climate. Myongho’s
work in environment-friendly farming, Younghee’s work with women peasants, and
other activists’ personal developments in their collective work for social justice
proved that the activists were making headway to break their old ways.
The Significance of Political Alliance
In social actions, the activists learned the importance of political alliance.
Peasants should go beyond their own interests and work for the common cause with
other groups of people fighting for social justice. Freire’s articulation on the
oppressor’s effort to divide and rule the oppressed seemed very instructive.
This is another fundamental dimension of the theory of oppressive action which is as old as oppression itself. As the oppressor minority subordinates and dominates the majority, it must divide it and keep it divided in order to remain in power. The minority cannot permit itself the luxury of tolerating the unification of the people, which would undoubtedly signify a serious threat to their own hegemony. Accordingly, the oppressors halt by any method (including violence) any action which in even incipient fashion could awaken the oppressed to the need for unity. (Freire, 2000, p. 141)
The activists worked hard to build alliances locally as well as nationally. In
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their communities, there are many organizations and different views. Some are
active in the peasant movement, some are sympathetic but stand by, and some are
hostile. The activists need to learn how to work with peasants with different views,
building alliances to advance peasant causes. Especially in the face of opening a rice
market, different peasant organizations began to have a common cause for which to
fight and most peasants found common ground to work with.
The activists invited many organizations, even groups which didn’t share
their political positions, into their meetings to build a coalition. Myongho reflected
on his experience:
There are lots of peasant organizations in communities and some of them are funded by the government. Naturally they were conservative. They sometimes criticized government policies but they didn't act on their positions. Just talking. But we need to include those organizations into our coalition to win.
Kwangsik remembered the rally they had last year when many groups in his
community joined together.
We had many local members to join the efforts to solve community issues. Every myon had different problems and we got together to talk about all the issues. Everyone insisted that their problems were serious and needed to be solved immediately but when we discussed the issues, we negotiated the priority and made compromises to set priorities. Last year, we had a big rally to protest against the opening of a rice market. Unlike previous rallies, this time peasant organizations such asBunyohoe (Women Organization) and Ijanghoe (Village Head Association) previously considered as government organizations joined the rally due to the collective efforts previously made in discussing community issues. That was the biggest rally for a recent decade.
Sora also vividly remembered the scene.
The rally was organized mainly to protest against the opening of the rice market but we all shared the different issues of the different regions.
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Peasants filled up the square in front of the city. In the middle of the rally, peasant union members had their heads shaved and wrote a protest letter with their blood to show their determination to fight against the market opening. Many peasants at the scene were crying. Since then, whenever they had community issues, peasants came to the local and asked for help. So we all got together, shared opinions, and found a way to solve the problems together. Last year, we had two elections. One was for the National Congress Representative and the other for mayor. We brought the candidates to our alliance meetings and listened to what the candidates could do to solve the problems. All groups had already discussed the problems and we were demanding together so that it was much more powerful than separate actions of each group.
Kiho also expressed their work breaks a crack into the traditional leadership in their
communities.
At the time, peoples thought that the peasant union was a work of communism but they didn’t think it anymore because they witnessed how the local and its members worked in their community. They finally recognized that the local and its members were not working for their personal and organizational interests only. They began to give credit for the commitment of the local union members. But it took a long time to get such recognition. Nowadays, the local has a lot of influence on their community and no one can do anything without asking for local help. Last time when we went to Seoul to protest, we used 60 buses. Naturally, there are established groups in our community and they were the one who traditionally exerted crucial influence on the peasants. To them, the local is a pain in the neck.
In another case, the activists worked with labor unions and university
students. As a good example, public servants were organizing and mass media was
busy criticizing their organizing efforts. The activists invited members of the
Korean Government Employees’ Union to their community meetings in which the
union members explained their purpose. Later, the union members joined the
peasants’ fight to stop the opening of the rice market. Such efforts helped peasants
understand the union better and strengthened solidarity between the peasants and the
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workers. Based on those experiences of a political alliance, the activists were
working to build Minjoong Yondai (Peoples' Alliance), which is a coalition of
various groups in their communities.
Sunhee explained how they worked to build the alliance:
It was impossible for public servants and teachers to make unions during the 80s under the military dictatorships. People also had a hard time in understanding the concept of public servants and teachers as workers. Peasant union members initiated the meetings between the peasants and the members of the public servant union in their communities. The union members had a chance to explain their situation which was usually silenced in mass media. Later, peasant union members also had the same opportunity in meetings with labor workers. In those meetings, they were both learning why they had to work together.
University students also actively worked with peasants. Kwangsik
remembered his early days.
At the time, we didn’t have an office for the local so we asked university students whether we could sellMagulli (traditional wine) at their festival. The university student union gave us a green light and we sold the wine for three days. We made 70man won ($700.00) and the local members chipped in 30 man Won. With the money, we could rent an office for the local.
But there were some changes in the alliance between university students and
peasants. During the 80s when Korea suffered under the military dictatorships, the
student movement was the only group powerful enough to organize direct actions,
leading the alliance with labor workers and peasants. However, the labor movement
and the peasant movement developed exponentially since then and began to make
their own initiative.
Sunhee explained the current situation.
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In the old days, when we mentioned “class alliance,” that meant the alliance led by student movement, like students and peasants and students and labor workers. Student movement was the leader in this alliance. But this concept became obsolete these days. Now, the labor movement and peasant movement have been developed to the level that they don’t need students’ assistance any more.
Gender Awareness
When they were in universities, they were the equal members of student
unions and they worked together based on the notion. However, when they came to
their communities, the situation was different from the universities. Gender
inequality was rampant in their communities and even in the locals. Especially,
women activists had to find a way to raise their voices in a much more conservative
environment than their universities. In such an environment, male activists, the
husbands, had more leverage to play while women peasants had to struggle more.
Younghee reflected on the issue.
When I looked around families in my community, families of local union members had a better environment in term of gender equality but there are many women peasants suffering from domestic violence. I think that women peasants were in charge of financial management in their homes but they didn’t have a social status for the role. For example, suppose a peasant couple raising cucumbers. The wife work hard, as much as her husband. After the harvest, the couple sorted out their cucumbers into two kinds. Good and bad. The good one was sent to market under the name of the husband. The bad one was sold with the wife’s name. The wife actually managed the money and worked as much as her husband but she couldn’t be regarded as a peasant. From when I started working here, we talked about raising the social status of women peasants and kept demanding it. We made some progress but we still have long way to go.
Sora talked about her experience in the community,
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I had a problem communicating with my husband. I had lots of grudges against him but I thought I had to endure this as an activist. I didn't think that it was caused by gender inequality in this society and the inequality made impact on my personal relationship. When I looked around the local women peasants, most of them are not free from their husbands in terms of their opinions. As husbands took different positions on a certain issue, it affected the relationship of the wives and it went sour. If I took a different position from my husband, people couldn't understand it. They think a wife should go along with her husband. In Korea, male enjoyed more privileges than women, and the case is more apparent in rural areas than urban.
She also pointed out that women peasant activists had to take a supporting role for
their husbands.
Women had to support their families while husbands kept working on organizing. As university graduates, the wives had access to more jobs than normal peasant wives. So they found jobs in different places. They came here to engage in movement but suddenly they found themselves in a situation where they struggle to survive, which caused lots of dilemma in them.
She also talked about her experience in the women’s organization.
My center was under criticism from other centers and some men. They accused my center of espousing divorce. In the case of domestic violence, we talked to the victim that it was not their faults. Rather we blamed on the violent husband. We encouraged them to get out of self-pity and to find a solution. Often, the women decided to get divorced. That's why we got the criticism.
Sunhee talked about her experience.
I worked for the local of KPL in my community and I also worked for KWPA. But I think peasants were hesitant to allow women peasants to take leadership positions like the local president and secretary general in their locals. When I said I wanted to be secretary general in the local, they almost fainted.
But she stressed that it has been changed when she was asked whether the
environment was persisting in rural areas.
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I think it has changed. When we look at the demography of the rural area, population over 50 is about 60% and women peasants took the lion’s share of the elderly population. Naturally, organizing women peasants becomes a key issue not only for the women peasant association but also for peasant organization.
She added:
I think the feminist movement in Korea has been influenced by American feminism which lacked the understanding of class and community. It also has been initiated by mostly middle-class intellectuals. I think this trend is wrong and I believe that women peasants and women labor workers should be the subject of the feminist movement.
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CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS FOR ADULT EDUCATION
In his critique of the adult education literature in social movements, Foley
(1999) points out the lack of specific analysis on social movements.
It has been argued, correctly I think, that social movements are important sites of emancipatory adult learning and that more attention needs to be paid to this dimension of their activity. But much of this discussion has been abstract and exhortatory. A lot of energy has gone into debating the distinction between “old” and “new” social movements. Social movements have been discussed in general terms- there had been almost no extended analysis of specific social movements or instances of social action, (p. 134)
He continues to claim that there are huge sources of learning in social movements
but they need to be developed and studied.
The potential field of study is huge and almost untouched. Detailed accounts of particular struggles exist in the literatures of labour history, women’s history, urban studies, development studies and associated fields. The learning dimension can be “read into” such studies, in the way I have done in Chapters 2 and 6 of this book, and much more needs to be done in this regard, (p. 140)
I cannot agree any more and we, as adult educators, need to do more to develop
such studies which address the historical learning process of the participants in
social movements (Brod, Schaefer, &Thompson, 2003; Dirks & Kovan, 2003;
Fantasia, 1988; Green, 2000; Holsworth, 1989; Lipsitz, 1995; Shuldiner, 1995;
Thompson, 2001). This dissertation sought to fill the gap which Foley pointed out
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by exploring the learning process of the student activists-tumed-peasant activists in
the peasant movement in a Korean context. This study clearly proves that social
movements are the greatest source of transformative learning for adults. The
participants of this study acquired new visions, developed their own pedagogies,
and obtained new knowledge through their direct actions.
The peasant activists went through the transformative learning process while
they were in universities in which they became aware of the political situation of
their country. It was a moment of “awakening” in their lives. Many things they
believed to be true turned out to be profound lies forged by the military regimes, and
they became student activists to fight against the military dictatorships, working to
build a more democratic and egalitarian society. With the passion for social change,
they jumped into a life-threatening situation voluntarily and their commitment has
continued by turning themselves into peasants for over a decade.
The lives as peasants were so desperate that many student activists-tumed-
peasant activists gave up their vision and fled their communities. But the
participants of this study sustained their commitment and continued to work. The
transformative learning experience in their communities gave them a new vision for
their lives and they chose to live with a more developed sense of value and
commitment instead of pursuing personal interests.
The vision of the activists has been transformed through the learning process
in their engagements in the social movement. At first, their vision was abstract and
short-sighted. But their work in their communities for the cause helped them rebuild
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their vision on the concrete reality and long-term goals. As Frieire and Myles (1990)
point out, it was a mutual learning process. The activists came to their communities
to organize peasants but they learned from peasants (Mayo, 1997). There was no
hierarchical relationship between the activists and the peasants in the communities.
The elite notion of leading peasants into a movement became obsolete and the
activists were creating a new vision with the peasants while they were struggling
under the devastative impact of capital-driven globalization.
They also learned that the process of working together in democratic ways
seemed more important than clear-cut goals for future. Yet, their vision has not been
changed in a way that they are still working for a more democratic and egalitarian
society, and their commitment for the cause made them sustain their work in very
difficult situations.
As educators in their communities, they developed their way of working
with peasants: pedagogy of commitment, pedagogy of building relationship, and
pedagogy of dialogue. In the current adult education literature, dialogue took center
stage as a way of facilitating adult learning in various contexts and it has been
discussed as a tool to facilitate adult learning to some extent. Yet, the experience of
the activists revealed that the dialogue couldn’t begin out of a vacuum. It required
the activists with a strong commitment for social justice and sound relationships
with the peasants in their communities. When their commitment and their
relationship with peasants faltered, their dialogue with peasants also suffered. In this
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way, dialogue became their way of life and their way of work in the communities
for the activists.
Direct actions offered various opportunities to reflect on the activists’ tactics
and they learned from the experience. Building an alliance was one of the key
lessons. A call for the alliance in social movements is not new, but the real
experience of solidarity is not prevailing in the history of social movements. The
peasant activists had to work with other groups to build their movements and they
had to learn to understand their movement in a national and international context. In
their pursuit of social justice, the activists also experienced continuing personal
transformation and became more aware of gender and environment in their
community work.
This study offered several implications for the field of adult education. First
of all, it proved that social movements are the key sources of adult learning and it
calls for more research on the transformative learning process of adults in social
movements. In this study, the place of peasant movement became a learning place
for the participants and they accumulated an enormous amount of knowledge in the
pursuit of the peasant cause. It also showed that the participants’ learning in the
movement was heavily influenced by the broad context such as political and
economical situation of the nation. As the nation developed into a more democratic
and economically developed status, the contents of learning for the participants have
been changed and their social analysis has become more inclusive by developing
awareness of gender and environment in their work. For example, the participants
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considered themselves as a vanguard of the Korean revolution in the 1980s but the
idea gradually developed into the notion of “bottom-up” and “grass-roots”
development in the 1990s. On a personal level, the participants believed they had to
sacrifice everything they had for the common cause in the 1980s but they began to
develop their personal interests, such as sustainable agriculture, in the movement
and recognize the importance of seeking a balance between personal developments
and social change in the 1990s. In recent literature, the differences between old
social movements and new social movements were widely discussed, but the
participants working on the various issues such as class, gender, and environment
proved that there is no need to make such artificial distinctions. In order to fully
understand adult learning in various contexts, current adult literature needs more
research based on sociological analysis.
Second, the learning process of the participants in this study showed that the
process was neither linear nor individual. Rather, it was a complex spiral and
collective process. The participants gradually developed through the learning
process, but they also experienced setbacks in the process. They also developed
themselves in their collective work. Their learning and the developed sense of self-
independence was the result of their engagement in their collective work. Current
adult education literature is stressing the development of competitive individual
learners, but the study revealed that the participants learned quicker and more
effectively in their groups. Collective learning has not been studied enough in the
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current literature and social movements seemed to be a strong place to figure out the
process.
Third, the study showed that rationality was not the key factor in initializing
the participants’ learning process as much as it was triumphed in the North
American adult education literature; rather, nonrationality factors, such as their
commitment for the cause, their value, and their relationship with the peasants,
played a more important role in their learning. Adult education literature needs to
develop more research on those factors to fully understand the adult learning
process.
Finally, this study revealed that building relationships played an important
role in their social learning. It facilitated dialogue in their groups as well as speeding
up their learning process. Thus, it must be considered as a key factor in adult
learning and we need to understand adult learners in their contexts without
extracting them out of the social relations.
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